While Twitter might be the channel with the most social media automation opportunities, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t look for ways to automate other social media channels. In this case, Pinterest.
Look, Pinterest has over 100 million active users.
That’s a lot of people.
And those aren’t just people who signed up to create an account, but people who are using the site.
Depending on your business, it might make sense to utilize Pinterest as a channel to promote your content.
Unlike Twitter, there just aren’t a lot of options for Pinterest automation. This is mainly due to a young API that hasn’t opened up the way Twitter or even Facebook have.
Most Pinterest applications revolve around analytics and scheduling pins, but very few around the practice of bulk following and unfollowing of users.
So what do you do when you don’t have many options?
You build your own free Pinterest follow and unfollow tool.
So let’s jump in to see how to build your own Pinterest bot.
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Why Would You Want to Bulk Follow & Unfollow Pinterest Users
Automation is meant to make our lives easier by reducing the amount of manual tasks we need to do. I’ve covered how to bulk follow social media users, but each method entailed the use of a paid platform.
The use of automation will allow you to perform the repetitive, mundane tasks with a just a few clicks. Not only saving you the agonizing experience of doing the same thing over and over, but also save you loads of time to spend on other stuff.
Think about, does this sound like something you want to do over and and over again?
- Search through hundreds of results
- Click on each one to follow
- Unfollow users not following back
I don’t know about you, but I have better things I would rather do with my time.
Luckily, automation can alleviate this massive headache for you.
But honestly, there aren’t many paid options for automating the following of Pinterest users. And they are just not that good or reliable.
You are more than welcome to see if there is one that fits your needs in my mega list of social media tools.
But what if you are ballin’ on a budget?
You want something that can not only get the job done in a semi-automated fashion, but will also keep a little money in your pocket.
I’ve already shown you how to hack together your own Twitter follow and unfollow bot, and today I am going to show you how to create your own Pinterest bot for free.
Tools You’ll Need To Build Your Own Pinterest Follow Bot
Since we are interested in creating this Pinterest bot for free, I’m going to only use free tools and plugins. So here is what you will need:
- Firefox
- Imacros for Firefox
- Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel
I think we are all familiar with Firefox, Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. So I won’t beat you down with telling you stuff you already know.
However, many of you might not be familiar with Imacros.
If you haven’t used or heard of Imacros, just think of it as an easy way to have your web browser automate repetitive tasks for you. I think it’s the one browser tool underutilized by many.
Be sure to add Imacros to FireFox before moving on to the next section.
And what’s awesome, here is what your process will look like when complete. It takes just seconds to scrape a list and then begin following them.
Check it out:
It’s important to note that when you install Imacros, you install version 8.9.7 as versions after this are not quite stable and might not work with what I am going to go over below.
You’ll then need to be sure to turn off automatic updates by clicking on the “more” button under your iMacros add-on in Firefox, then scrolling to the bottom and clicking the “off” button for automatic updates.
All setup? Let’s start scraping Pinterest!
Mass Follow Pinterest Users
Before you can bulk follow users on Pinterest, you need to find the users to follow. There are a few ways to find these users:
- Followers of another Pinterest Account
- Users a Pinterest account is following
- Pinterest search results
I have to say, that when it comes to search – Pinterest search sucks pretty bad when compared to Twitter.
However, it is what it is and we’ll just have to live with it…for now (hopefully).
Bulk Follow the Followers of a Pinterest Account
So, let’s say I wanted to follow people that are following the Pinterest account for Rebekah Radice. The first thing I would need to do is head on over to her “Followers” page.
In Firefox, you will need to be sure that you have the Imacros extension opened up. Typically, it will show up on the left side of your FireFox window.
You will need to do a one-time setup for each of the scripts I mention in this blog post.
So what you will need to do is:
- Click on the “Record” tab and click “record”
- Click stop
- Click “Manage” and then “Edit Macro”
- Enter the code provided:
- Click “Save & Close”
- Next, right-click on the “Current.iim” text and select “Rename”
- Name your Imacros script as “Pinterest-Scraper.js”
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What this code will do is save the URL of each username on the page.
But, before we can scrape these users, we need to make an adjustment to our Firefox browser. Here’s what you will need to do:
- Hit “Control +” to zoom in so that there are 4 profiles shown per row
If you do not have four followers per row, the script will not scrape correctly. So be sure to do this 🙂
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Now, in order to start following someone else’s users is to select the “Pinterest Scraper.js” and then click on the “Play” tab. This script will keep running until all accounts have been scraped for this user. You can always click “stop” to end the scraping early if you would like.
Once users have been scraped, you can open up the CSV file that was created and delete any accounts you wish to remove. Save any changes to the file.
Then the last thing you do is create the following script:
- Be sure to:
- Click “Save & Close”
- Next, right-click on the “Current.iim” text and select “Rename”
- Name your Imacros script as “Pinterest-Follow.iim”
Then select “Pinterest-Follow.im” and enter the number of users you would like to follow in the “Play Loop” section. And then click “Play Loop” – Imacros will start following people from your CSV file until it reaches that number.
[bctt tweet=”Within a matter of minutes, you can easily follow someone else’s followers on Pinterest automatically” username=”Bulkly”]
[yellowbox]Free Bonus: Make it easy on yourself…Get all the ready-to-go Imacros scripts to mass follow and unfollow people on Pinterest. Click here to download. [/yellowbox]
Mass Follow Pinterest Users Someone Else is Following
If you want to follow the people someone else is following, it’s pretty much the exact same process.
The difference is that you will need to navigate to the “Following” page of a user. For example, if you wanted to follow the people that Social Media Examiner follow, you would visit their profile and click on the “Following” page. Then you would need to click on the “People” tab in order to see the users.
From here, you would run the same script from the previous section:
- “Pinterest Scraper.js”
- “Pinterest-Follow.iim”
Just remember to enter the total number of people you would like to follow in the “Repeat Macros” section when running the “Pinterest-Follow.iim” script.
One thing to note is that each time you run the “Pinterest Scraper.js” script, those results will be added to the end of the last data you scraped. So you could scrape users from multiple profiles and pages if you want.
[yellowbox]Free Bonus: Make it easy on yourself…Get all the ready-to-go Imacros scripts to mass follow and unfollow people on Pinterest. Click here to download. [/yellowbox]
Use Pinterest Search to Mass Follow Accounts
Another option to blindly follow Pinterest accounts is through the use of Pinterest search. As mentioned earlier, Pinterest search is not the most robust.
But don’t let that scare you from trying it out.
If you know what phrases you would like to search for, you are pretty much set. Should you not know what to search for, just think of some keyword phrases that your target market would pin about.
Once you have a few in mind, head on over to Pinterest and run a search.
For example, if you wanted to search for people who pinned about “social media”, you would simply enter it into the search bar. After the results page loads, you then click on the “People” tab to see the users you want to follow.
From there, you simply run the following scripts:
- “Pinterest Scraper.js”
- “Pinterest-Follow.iim”
Just be sure so that the search results show four profiles per row before running the “Pinterest Scraper.js” script.
[bctt tweet=”It’s simple to automate the mass following of users from a Pinterest search.” username=”Bulkly”]
In just a few minutes, you can follow quite a few targeted Pinterest accounts with very little effort.
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Mass Unfollow Pinterest Users Not Following You Back
Look, you don’t want to be that person that is following tens of thousands of people with only a couple hundred following back.
It just doesn’t look good.
With social media, you’ll want to always aim to have more people following you than you are following.
And the way to help tilt the count in your favor is to unfollow Pinterest accounts who are not following back.
In order to properly unfollow users who are not following you back, you will need to do two different things.
Scrape Your Pinterest Followers
The first thing is to create a list of all of your followers. To do this, you will need to visit the page that shows who is following you. For me, this would be this page.
From this page, you’ll want to be sure that only four profiles are showing per row.
Then you will run a new Imacro script. Just like you set up the previous scripts, you will need to:
- Click on the “Record” tab and click “record”
- Click stop
- Click “Manage” and then “Edit Macro”
- Enter the code provided:
- Click “Save & Close”
- Next, right-click on the “Current.iim” text and select “Rename”
- Name your Imacros script as “Pinterest Scraper – Followers.js”
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The way this code works is that is will save the username of every person that is following you into a CSV file named “scraped-pinterest-followers.csv” within your Imacros “downloads” folder.
All you have to do is run the macro and wait.
If your Pinterest follower account is high, it might take 10 minutes or so to complete.
Scrape Users You are Following on Pinterest
Next, you will want to create another Imacros script to create a CSV of the Pinterest users you are following using the code provided:
- Rename the script as “Pinterest Scraper – Following.js”
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To use this script, you will need to be on the page that shows the users you are following. For example, my page would be here. Just be sure to click the “People” tab.
Then run the “Pinterest Scraper – Following.js” script.
This script will save all the users you are following into a CSV file named “scraped-pinterest-following.csv” inside your Imacros “downloads” folder.
Depending on how many users you are scraping it might take a few minutes to complete.
Find The Pinterest Users Not Following Back
Now that we have a list of Pinterest accounts that you are following as well as those that are following you, we need to find the users that don’t appear on both lists. Doing so will let you know who is not following you back.
Here is what you will need to do:
- Open the “scraped-pinterest-followers.csv”
- Open the “scraped-pinterest-following.csv”
- Copy Column A from the “scraped-pinterest-following.csv” and paste into Column B of “scraped-pinterest-followers.csv”
- In cell A1, create a table from the data by clicking “Ctrl +T” and hit enter
- In cell C1, use this formula and copy all the way down
[perfectpullquote align="full" cite="" link="" color="" class="" size=""]=IFERROR(VLOOKUP([@Column2],[Column1],1,FALSE),"Not Following Back")[/perfectpullquote]
- Then filter Column C to show “Not Following Back
- Copy those users into a new CSV file and save it as “scraped-pinterest-unfollow.csv” in the same folder as your other Imacros CSV files
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Bonus Tip: Reverse list of users order to show Pinterest accounts you followed based on date oldest to newest[/perfectpullquote]
By reversing the order of your list, you can unfollow Pinterest accounts that you followed chronologically from oldest to newest. This will allow some of the newer people you followed to follow you back before running the unfollow process on them.
So in your CSV file:
- In Cell B1 enter the number 1 and then drag and fill that column all the way to the end
- Click on the “Sort & Filter” button in the “Home” tab
- Uncheck the “My data has headers” box
- Sort by “Column B”
- Sort by “Largest to Smallest”
- Click “OK”
- Delete Column “B” and save your CSV file as “scraped-pinterest-unfollow.csv”
The last thing you will need to do is run this Imacros script to unfollow those users:
- Just be sure to set your “Repeat Macro” field to a maximum number of Pinterest users to unfollow
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This Imacros script will visit each URL of the CSV file of Pinterest accounts that are not following you back and click the unfollow button on their profile. It also adds a random delay between 0-10 seconds to help simulate the unfollows being performed manually instead of automatically.
While this is not as simple as mass following Pinterest users, it’s not too difficult to do if you need to bulk unfollow Pinterest users not following back.
I recommend bulk unfollowing once a week or so since it is a little bit more man power to execute.
Again, with Pinterest there are not a lot of paid tools out there that can do this…and most aren’t that good at doing it. So why not take the free approach?
Besides, you can use that saved money on a social media tool that is worth paying for.
Are You Going To Build Your Own Pinterest Follow Tool?
Now that I showed you how to build your own Pinterest follower tool, are you going to use it?
It might seem like it takes a bit to set up, but trust me – once you have the initial scripts setup it will be a breeze to bulk follow Pinterest accounts.
You’ll just need to spend a few minutes setting up the Imacro scripts and you are good to go.
What’s nice about setting up a process like this is that once it’s setup, it will only take a few seconds a day to click the “Play Loop” button and let it run in the background while you spend your extra time on something useful.
Of course it might seem tedious to to take this approach, but when you are doing things on a budget as an entrepreneur you’ll look at the different social media hacks you can use to save time and money. Ultimately, the money saved can be put towards something else.
However, as with any form of automation – don’t overdo it or use it as a replacement for engaging with your audience.
Ready to build your own free bulk Pinterest follow and unfollower bot?
Grab the ready to go scripts below.
[yellowbox]Free Bonus: Make it easy on yourself…Get all the ready-to-go Imacros scripts to mass follow and unfollow people on Pinterest. Click here to download. [/yellowbox]