In this paper, a new pinning control scheme called DF (data flow)-based pinning scheme is proposed. The new scheme can obtain the similar pinning efficiency with BC-based pinning scheme in real-world networks. Comparing with BC-based pinning scheme, DF-based pinning scheme has two main advantages. First, it just needs local information of network. Second, the new pinning scheme has a much lower time complexity than BC-based pinning scheme. In this paper, we have pinned two real-world networks (the US airline routing map network and the protein–protein network in yeast) to compare the new pinning scheme with degree-based, BC-based, LBC-based pinning schemes and we also pin a small-world network, a scale-free network to analyze DF-based pinning scheme in detail. Based on the Lyapunov stability theory, the validity of the scheme is proved. Finally, the numerical simulations are verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.