Instagram vs Pinterest: Where to Spend the Most Time?

Instagram vs Pinterest for Website Traffic Growth

In this post I’ll be sharing with you my experience building traffic from both Instagram and Pinterest.

As a blogger, you may be wondering which platform will give you better results in sending followers back to your website to read your content.

We spend so many hours writing blog posts for our websites that it’s disheartening when no one even sees or reads them.

Therefore, it’s important to know where to market these blog posts so you can get traffic to them and people actually read them!

If you’re limited on time and only want to focus on building one platform to share your content, then I recommend Pinterest. Here is why I choose Pinterest over Instagram.

Why I Love Pinterest as a Blogger

I’ve been running my golf niche site GolfPracticeGuides.com since October of 2014. I started an Instagram account for it in 2015 and it’s grown to over 28,000 followers.

It wasn’t until February 2017 that I started using Pinterest. I solely focused on Instagram for a few years and had some success making sales in my online store from followers.

But once I started using Pinterest, my traffic surged like never before and in just a few months time! It’s pretty mind blowing when I look at my numbers and I think you’ll be convinced as well that Pinterest is best.

Resource: Pinterest Traffic Growth eCourse

Pinterest is a Search Engine

The reason Pinterest is so successful compared to Instagram is because Pinterest is a search engine. Users can type keywords and phrases into a search bar and Pinterest will pull up pins that are most relevant to the search query.

This is how so many users find my different articles related to different parts of the golf game each week. Where as on Instagram, they’d have to search my profile name first and then scroll through all my posts history to see old posts.

But it gets better.

Pins Can Be Linked Directly to Blog Posts

Pins can be linked directly to a blog post article unlike an Instagram post. On Instagram, you only get one location to link back to your website and that location is the website link in your profile bio.

This may change in the future however, as Instagram is rolling out a beta feature only influencers get access to right now where you can link to things in your My Story. A lot of YouTubers are linking their YouTube videos in their My Story for example.

You Can Schedule Pins to Publish on Autopilot

I also love that you can schedule Pins using a software tool like Tailwind to automatically publish to your different boards on different dates.

This saves you so much time from having to log in each day to manually pin, especially if you’re trying to pin 15-30 times per day which is what Pinterest recommends.

Try 1 Month of Tailwind Free by Using this Link

Pinterest has a Longer Post Lifespan

Another major reason I love Pinterest is the lifespan of your post. Once you pin something on Pinterest, it can be found years from now since Pinterest is a search engine. Your posts will get shared and repinned for years to come.

Every day I have pins I posted months ago still showing up as my top traffic sources getting 60-70 views per day.

Pinterest Post Can Go Viral Much Easier

Pinterest also trumps Instagram in terms of content going viral.

It’s vary rare a post on Instagram goes viral and gets thousands of views and likes. And even if your post did go viral on Instagram, there is no where to place links in your post that people can click to visit your website. They would have to click on your profile name to open up your biography page and then click the link in your bio.

With Pinterest, I’ve had several pins go viral already in the short few months I’ve been on the platform. It started out where I’d get 500 visitors from a pin in one day. Then that became the norm and going viral meant getting over 1,000 visitors. Now it’s 1,500 because 1,000 soon became the norm for a brief period.

Resource: Download my Viral Pin Checklist to design awesome pins

So now that I’ve shared several reasons and features that make Pinterest the better platform to focus on for blogging, let’s dive into the numbers so the math can fully convince you.

Comparing Traffic: Pinterest vs Instagram

Remember, my Instagram account has over 28,000 followers and my Pinterest has only 200 followers. You’d naturally want to think that Instagram sends more traffic because it has 140X more followers.

Here is the monthly traffic breakdown from Instagram vs Pinterest:

February 2017:

Pinterest – 653 sessions
Instagram – 163 sessions

March 2017:

Pinterest – 1,485 sessions
Instagram – 307 sessions

April 2017:

Pinterest – 3,548 sessions
Instagram – 470 sessions

May 2017:

Pinterest – 7,741 sessions
Instagram – 209 sessions

June 2017:

Pinterest – 19,395 sessions
Instagram – 62 sessions

5 Month Totals Compared:

Pinterest – 32,812 sessions
Instagram – 1,211 sessions

As you can see, Pinterest is blowing Instagram out of the water for traffic its sending to my website. Every month my Pinterest traffic is growing 100% or more. It nearly tripled in June!

This explosive growth is a result of all the points listed above: Search Engine, Longer Lifespan of a Post, Ability to Go Viral, No Need for Large Followers, etc.

How to Get Started Using Pinterest

If you’re convinced that Pinterest is where you need to focus your time to grow your blog, then check out this course that is going to be game changer.

If you want to grow from 600 monthly Pinterest visitors to almost 20,000 visitors in a few short months like I did, then this course will teach you everything you need to know. Learn more about Profitable Pinterest Traffic here.

It comes with worksheets, checklists, and lots of training videos to help you set up your Pinterest profile and drive traffic back to a website page or email landing page. Discover the strategies to rank your pins higher in the search feed so they get found by Pinterest users. Save yourself time and money using my system.

Get started driving traffic to your website

If you can’t justify spending some money on your education and business to help you grow, no worries!

Here are a few free blog articles you can read instead but I highly recommend the paid course to save you time and set you up with the right systems to succeed.

Additional Articles & YouTube Videos:

Thank you so much for giving me your most valuable resource, TIME, and spending it reading my content. If you enjoy my other posts, please share them on Pinterest or Facebook! Thanks (:

Nick Foy

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