What if there were a way to create a powerful pin, and have it go viral with someone else’s audience?
Without paying a dime.
As we briefly mentioned in our research lesson, this does exist.
They’re called “Group Boards”.
These are boards that more than one person can pin content to, and as users can follow specific boards, they come bundled with their own audiences.
If you share content to a group board, you are likely to be sharing it with at least 500 followers of that group board.
So, if you’re lucky, you can create content that enough of the group board’s followers share that it goes viral.
Here are 4 ways that group boards are powerful additions to your Pinterest strategy:
1. Increasing Your Initial Followers
Group boards should be part of your initial strategy to gain 500 followers.
The more locations that you can repin content to (that others will see) the more chances you have that people will look at your profile and start to follow you.
To make this easier, you can use Tailwind (or Jarvee or NinjaPinner) to schedule posts out to group boards that you’re a contributor to.
They’re no more difficult than normal boards to use, though most have posting rules and you’ll often need to jump through some hoops to join them.
Actually, Tailwind has a feature called “Board Lists” that helps with this even more.
As each normal board you’ve created has a distinct sub-niche of content posted to it, there was no need to schedule one piece of content to multiple boards.
When using group boards, this changes.
As you can see above, these “board lists” are great for grouping your one normal board (in blue) with all of the group boards (in green) that your content would also work on.
Just because you only have one “Self-Love” board, doesn’t mean your self-love pins wouldn’t do well being posted to the 10 self-love related group boards you’re a member of.
As you become a member of more and more group boards, I suggest you create board lists for each sub-niche of content you have. This allows you to automatically schedule one piece of content to ALL relevant boards at once, instead of individually.
2. Increasing Exposure of Your Unique Content
Once you start creating your own unique content, group boards can be a great way to get that content out to an even larger audience.
When you create content, you want to spread it to as many locations as possible to try and get it to go viral (to be repinned more than once for each repin it gets).
This is even more powerful when combined with our 0.01% best content research. As we’ve identified the most viral content in our niche, sometimes all it takes is to replicate that content, and share it to a group board to have it go viral.
Thousands of clicks a day might be only one great pin to a group board away.
3. Identifying Your Most Powerful Content
One of our main objectives for our initial test period (until you hit about 500 followers) is to also identify which content style, niche and type are the most viral on Pinterest.
Yes, you’ve used Ninja Pinner to pull all of the high-save content, but finding the best of that, for your audience, at this point in time, requires testing.
That’s a large reason why we are posting so many times per day; you need to post a lot of content to see what gets repinned the most. When you create your own unique content, you’ll want to take inspiration from already high performing content.
If you’re also posting content to group boards, you’ll be able to see how content performs in those as well, making you more sure of what content styles to focus on when you make your own pins.
As we’ve established: More data is always good!
4. Skyrocketing Followers
Once you have 2500 followers and above, it’s a smart idea to start creating a lot of your own group boards and inviting people to them.
I’d suggest you use NinjaPinner to find existing, similar group boards with tough entry requirements, collect the list of its contributors, and invite the best to your boards.
If you want one of the easiest ways to go from a few thousand to tens, or hundreds of thousands of followers, having big group boards is a great way to do this.
The reason you want to wait until you have a few thousand followers first is that when someone follows you on Pinterest, they can either follow your profile or one of your boards. If you have a few thousand followers of your PROFILE, then when you create a new board they will all be followers of that board.
When you create a group board, it’s going to be much easier to successfully invite contributors if you already have followers of the board so it’s worth their time.
With that said, it is wise to create posting limits, content rules etc. for your group board, and to spend time enforcing them (or having a virtual assistant doing this).
You don’t want your boards to get killed by spam users each posting 100 times per day to them.
Why even bother with your own boards?
With group boards, yes you can start posting straight away to an existing audience, which can work, and it may be worth testing some unique content on them before you hit 500 initial followers.
BUT!
It is still super important to build your own following.
A following that you can’t be shut out of.
Well, except by Pinterest themselves.
Your own following can be used to create group boards that can grow your total following to 5–7 figures. This is more valuable than being just a contributor to any group board.
Also, followers of group boards will get notifications from everyone that posts to them, so your content is going to have to compete with other people to get their attention.
You can completely control your own boards, so it’s important to do the previous steps as well as this one.
Again, group boards can help you hit 500 followers more quickly, even if you’re just repinning other people’s content to them with Tailwind.
They COULD be used to start making your own unique content straight away and sharing it there, and you should give this a test.
But, unless you’re very lucky, you’ll not get 10,000+ views to your website a day from group board followers.
How to find group boards:
Look to your research
The first step is to look at your influencer research document (I told you the time investment would be worth it). Look at their boards you noted down, as you should have noted if they were group boards or not.
You now have a starting point for group boards that should be in your niche and relevant for you to join.
You don’t want group boards that have over 100,000 pins, as people are generally posting to these so often that your content will never be seen.
If you really want to test this out you can leave a group board tab open and then refresh it an hour later to see how many extra posts have been added. You don’t want a potential group board to get more than about 2–5 posts per hour (or more than 25–50 posts in 24 hours if you want to do it over a longer time to be sure).
Again, they may have certain rules or criteria for joining them — you may have to email to request access, you may have to leave a comment on a certain pin, they may be invite-only, but this is my best suggestion for finding them.
Pin Groupie
The second great way to find group boards is with PinGroupie. PinGroupie is a directory of group boards, sorted by niche, pins, collaborators etc. It can be a great way to quickly identify group boards that are actively looking for contributors.
The process is the same as on Pinterest, so you’ll still have to look into how to apply to each, but it is useful to have them all in the same place.
Another helpful aspect of PinGroupie is you can submit your own group boards to here.
As long as your board has 500 followers, 2 contributors and 10 pins, you can list it in their directory.
There’s not really any downside of submitting your boards here, and you can, of course, filter applications for contributors with whatever method you’d like.
However, don’t expect a whole load of applications at first. Until your board has 2–3x the entry stats, it’s not going to stand out from the crowd much.
Also, inviting contributors with NinjaPinner can be a more effective way to kickstart your board, as you can be more selective with who you target.
I’d suggest you apply to 10–20 group boards, hopefully, you’ll get on to 5–10 of them.
Tailwind Tribes
Tailwind has its own sharing platform; “Tailwind Tribes”.
Tribes are like a group board community, but not linked to a certain board. You join tribes, and can then submit your own content to the tribe, in exchange for sharing material from the tribe’s members to your boards.
You’ll need to share a certain amount of pins before you can submit your own.
Similar to group boards, you can also create your own tribes.
Tribes can be great for growth when your account is small, but as this strategy tends to explode accounts within a few months, they can lose their value quickly.
Here are some of their issues:
- Tribes aren’t linked to Pinterest’s analytics. So while you’ll see how many impressions you content is getting within the tribe’s ecosystem, you’re unsure how that’s translating into actual impressions on Pinterest.
- 3. Tribes can suffer from the same issues as group boards; if the tribe is too large, few will see your pins, if the tribe is too small, you’re unlikely to get much extra reach for your pins.
- As you’ve already figured out what much of the best content on Pinterest is, it might be a waste of your post slots to repost 5 pins from other accounts which, almost certainly will be trash, in return for sharing one of your own pins with the tribe.
It’s just the nature of any platform that the vast, vast, VAST majority of users are going to produce lackluster content.
This is bad if you’re forced to share their content, but good for your well-researched content to stand out.
So, tribes may be helpful, especially if it gets your content a huge amount of impressions within the tribe’s ecosystem, as people will tend to share that content more.
BUT.
Mostly it’s going to be more trouble than it’s worth.
Give it a test, see what happens.
CHECKLIST:
- Attempt to join group boards that your researched influencers are a part of.
- Use PinGroupie to find relevant group boards to apply to.
- Create at least 1 of your own group boards. Use Ninja Pinner’s Invite Tool to send requests to relevant users to join.
- Create Tailwind Board Lists to easily repin to the group boards you become a contributor for.
- Test using Tailwind Tribes to get more exposure for your pins.
If you found this post valuable, please hit the claps button as many times as you can. To continue your Pinterest journey here’s how to analyze the viral reposts you’ve made so you can start emulating them and unlocking absurd amounts of website visitors here.