Today I’m talking about how I super charge my Pinterest marketing efforts and how I schedule my pins using the powerful Tailwind App platform.
If you usually come to us for travel tips and inspiration, we’ll be back talking travel tomorrow. This post is one for the bloggers and business owners out there who want to take control of their Pinterest accounts and become power pinners!
So if you love Pinterest like we do, hang around because I’ve got some cool features to share about Tailwind and hopefully you’ll find this all, umm, Pinteresting!
In case you don’t know, we have one of the largest Pinterest accounts in the world with over 4 million followers and it has become such a major part of our blogging business. It brings us a TON of viral traffic to our blog and I wanted to share with you how we manage our account.
We love Pinterest – it has become this incredible visual search engine more so than a social media platform – and it fits perfectly with travel.
People aren’t going on there to connect with others, but to find content and get ideas around a bunch of categories, you name it you’ll probably find it on Pinterest. In fact, Pinterest has become a favourite search engine of many who use their search box to filter through the results.
Pinterest is such a great platform for dreaming, AND, in our case travel planning
There are essentially four phases of travel – Dream, Plan, Experience, Share.
Pinterest fits perfectly not only with the dream phase but also with the planning, experiencing and sharing phases.
Three of the main reasons people visit are:
Inspiration
Education
Planning
Whilst photos on Pinterest do a great job at inspiring, it’s the linked to information behind the pin that helps us to take action!
Pinterest for bloggers matters, and today I’m going to show you how you can turbo charge your Pinterest marketing efforts through using Tailwind.
We started using Tailwind App when it was just an analytics platform, but it has since become this amazing scheduling tool and content management platform that I couldn’t do without.
Introducing Tailwind App for Pinterest Marketing
To be clear with you, I am an affiliate of Tailwind but I’m also a paying customer just like the other 35,000 brands who use it to manage their Pinterest activities. It has totally changed how I use Pinterest and I’m on there every day!
If you end up loving all the benefits outlined below and sign up, I will receive a small affiliate commission which helps us keep the lights on at yTravel so we can continue bringing you awesome travel tips and blogging tips
Keep reading all the way to the end and you’ll be pinning like a Power Pinner in no-time!
8 Ways I use Tailwind App for Pinterest Marketing
In this post you’ll learn about:
Scheduling Pins
Knowing the best time to pin with the Smart Calendar
Scheduling Multiple Pins at once
Interval Pinning
Tailwind Analytics
Finding Your Best Pins with Pin Inspector
RSS Feed Management for Pinterest
Outsourcing Tailwind is Easy
1. Scheduling Pins
If you’re serious about Pinterest marketing, the ability to schedule pins is vital, especially if your target audience is in another time zone.
We’re currently based in Australia and if I just relied on live pinning I would be missing those key time periods when most of my audience is online in the USA, Canada and the UK.
Having a tool that allows me to schedule pins on Pinterest has become essential to my Pinterest marketing strategy, growing my followers, and bringing traffic back to my blog – which is what we all want right?!
In the past I would just pin whenever, now I use pin scheduling to maximise my efforts and Tailwind allows me to do this with just a few clicks!
Tailwind Browser extension
The first thing you want to do is get the Tailwind browser extension. It’s the easiest and fastest way to schedule pins on Pinterest. And it’s available via Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
This also allows you to schedule pins from anywhere around the web, including blog posts (no need to worry about saving website URLs or image URLs)!
Here is the icon display in my toolbar:
It’s easy to get started scheduling pins.
When you’re browsing on Pinterest or reading your favourite blogs and you see an image you want to pin, simply hover over the image and click on the schedule button that appears.
A new pop-up window appears with the image in my drafts.
In drafts I can:
select which board I want it added to.
change the description.
choose if I want to share it to facebook or twitter.
click on the little clock and select the month, the day and the time for the pin to be published.
Or, I can add it to my Smart Calendar using the auto-queue tool – keep reading because the “smart calendar” is one of my favourite features of Tailwind!
Scheduling pins is literally just as easy as it is to pin something in the first place.
2. Knowing the best time to pin – the Smart Calendar
This is possibly my favourite feature of Tailwind App for streamlining my Pinterest marketing!
Want to know the best time of the day to pin? It’s an important question, and Tailwind can help you with that.
The reality of the best time to pin is different for every audience, every board and every category.
If your audience works Monday-Friday they are going to be online mostly in the evenings and on the weekends. If your audience is stay-at-home mums and dads they could be online mostly during the day when the kids are at school.
My topic is travel, and my followers are located all over the world in various time zones, so figuring out the optimal time to pin when the majority of my audience is online is challenging. This is where Tailwind and the Smart Calendar steps in.
When you first sign up to Tailwind they crunch a bunch of data about what type of content you pin, and when your audience is most active on Pinterest.
They then create your Smart Schedule, which is a calendar of time slots for every day of the week. These time slots are a recommended time based on your specific audience and analytics:
When are they are active?
When are your pins getting the greatest response?
What’s the pin about?
What’s the board about the pin is going to?
Your schedule is personalized by applying insights from over 500 million pins and 200 million boards.
And you can add or remove time slots depending upon if you want to pin more, or less, throughout the week.
GREEN time slots are optimized by Tailwind (I recieve high engagement at these times)
GREY are times manually selected by me
DOTTED outline are more suggested times by Tailwind (as my audience changes extra time slots are suggested by Tailwind)
The Smart Calendar is my favorite feature of Tailwind App for improving my Pinterest Marketing
To add your pins to the Smart Schedule you simply use the Add to Queue Now button and they will automatically get added to the queue!
I love the Smart Calendar. It takes a lot of the guess work out of Pinterest marketing so you’re not worried about the perfect time to pin. You can set up an entire weekly pinning schedule (or longer). Just set and forget.
The power of tailwind is that you’re using your specific data and profile instead of going off broad time suggestions bandied about by so-called experts and other pinners.
Note: This is a recurring weekly schedule. You don’t have to worry about updating this each week! But you can optimize your calendar over time based on the changing habits of your audience.
And I love the flexibility of setting my times manually! Sometimes I like to pin for the Australian time zone in the morning, which coincides with the US evening time (my two biggest demographics). And apparently Saturday and Sunday afternoons is a sweet spot in the US?!
This feature alone sold me on Tailwind. With my calendar set I can be “showing up” on Pinterest whilst I’m asleep.
And I can throw away spreadsheets I’ve used in the past to track activity. The other great benefit is that Tailwind automatically tells you if you’ve already pinned something, when you last pinned it, and which boards you pinned it to
The Calendar Grid
Once you start scheduling pins you will see them displayed in a visual calendar. These thumb nail images represent all the images you have scheduled to coincide with your smart calendar time slots.
Some cool features of the grid are:
you can drag and drop updates into different time slots
hover over an image and it displays the date, time, board it will pin to
switch any update from auto-queue to a custom time to pin
hit the Shuffle Queue button which shuffles the order of your entire grid
3. Scheduling multiple pins at once
Because I publish about travel my blog posts tend to be very photo heavy so the ability to schedule multiple pins at once on Tailwind App saves me time and makes my Pinterest marketing more effective.
For example, my 38 best beaches in Australia post has over 38 photos.
Once I publish a new blog post I simply click on the icon in my toolbar and all the photos appear.
Say I wanted to schedule 15 of those photos from my best beaches post:
I click on each image which highlights them
hit Go Schedule
select which board I want them to go to
add them to the queue (or select a custom time)
boom…I’m done!
You can choose your photos to go to just one board, or multiple boards.
For one board, type that board name in the All boards to add box area and it will automatically populate all 15 photos.
For multiple boards, keep adding board names in that same box or from the drop down menu that appears.
Of course, you can schedule multiple pins from the Pinterest feed as well using the same steps.
4. Interval Pinning
This is another one of my favourite features of the Tailwind App.
Every one of my blog posts contains a featured image that I design using Canva or Picmonkey that’s specifically created for Pinterest marketing.
They are all vertical images sized 800 x 1200 and have text overlay (735 x 1102 is the recommended optimal size). But 800 is the width of my content area and I like to align the width with my horizontal images. Vertical images stand out more in the Pinterest feed and allow you more room to add that text overlay (I usually go with the title of my post).
What I love about interval pinning is that I can schedule one image to multiple boards with just a couple of clicks that literally takes 5 seconds.
Most of my blog posts are relevant for more than one board, such as my recent 48 hours in Sydney blog post.
I can pin that Sydney article to my:
yTravel Bucket List board
Australia Travel board
Travel Tips board
Quick Pinterest Marketing Tip:
If you’re not sharing your pins more than once to all your relevant boards you’re missing out on added exposure on Pinterest.
Because not everyone follows all of your boards (unless they’ve clicked on the follow all button) so it’s important to pin the same blog post to multiple boards that are all relevant to the content.
BUT, pinning everything all at once isn’t ideal. You need to space pins out a little so you’re not saturating your followers home feed. And Pinterest has indicated that too much pinning in a short time period could be viewed as “spammy”, potentially hurting your rankings in search results and feeds.
The Interval Pinning feature of Tailwind App allows you to set a time period between when each image gets pinned, from 10 minutes to 90 days apart. I typically set it to 24 hours between pins!
And the real power comes into play when you combine interval pinning with the auto-queue, again you just set it and forget it.
So essentially, you can clone pins across as many boards as you’d like!
Let’s use my Sydney image as an example:
Click on the Tailwind icon in the tool bar
Select the image
Hit the Go Schedule button
Type in the boards I want to pin it to
Click on the Use Interval button
Now I can choose the date and time for when the first pin gets published, or let the Smart Schedule take care of that, and I set the minimum time between each pin.
In the screenshot below you can see the three times chosen by my Smart Schedule:
Bucket list board on Fri @ 10:23 pm
Australia Travel board on Sunday @ 7:25 am
Travel Tips board on Monday @ 10:05 am
And below are the three pins displayed in my calendar grid:
Again, you can use interval pinning on any images whether they are in the Pinterest feed or anywhere on the web. You just have to choose more than one board when scheduling for the interval button to display!
Cool feature huh!
5. Tailwind Analytics
Yes, your Pinterest account has analytics, but Tailwind has its own specific set of analytics that are very powerful for your Pinterest marketing objectives!
I actually started with Tailwind App when they were an analytics company, before they became a publishing and pin scheduling tool. So they know how to crunch data.
You can get analytics on:
which of your pins is performing the best
which boards are performing the best
how many new followers you’re getting
Want to know a particular pin did or how pins are doing on a particular board? Just use the easy search functionality to find whatever it is you’re looking for.
Why should you even care about analytics for Pinterest?
Because Pinterest is a very aspirational site and our followers tell us their aspirations in life by the boards they create and the pins they share.
They tell us stuff like:
this is where I want to go on vacation
this is how I want my home office to look like
these are the food recipes I like to cook
As a blogger and a marketer, this information is GOLD. The key is finding out what your audience wants, and giving them more of that and solving their problems.
Weekly Summary
You get a weekly report showing total pins, repins, followers, and most repinned boards that can be broken down into your profile performance.
Profile Performance (last 7 days)
Virality Score
Virality Score = Total Repins divided by Total Pins
It’s a content quality metric. e.g. if you go from pinning 10x per week to pinning 100x per week you would expect your repins to grow, but, is your content getting better over time? How viral is your content? Are you over pinning or underpinning?
Engagement Score
Engagement Score = Total Repins divided by Total Pins divided by (1000 followers)
A metric in regards to follower growth over time thatT can give you an idea of how engaged your audience is with the content you are sharing.
Engagement Rate
How many of your pins have at least one pin vs. no repins
Board Insights
Click on each tab and column to display the relevant data.
Monitor Your Domain (ytravelblog.com)
See how much activity you are getting from your own blog or website over the last 7 days!
Latest Pins
What images have actually been pinned from your blog posts.
Referral Traffic
The number of visitors to your blog from Pinterest over last 7 days!
Important stat this, repins are nice but you want people clicking through to your blog!
6. Finding Your Best Pins with Pin Inspector
You’re just clicks away from repinning your best content.
In the Tailwind App dashboard is a tab called Pin Inspector, and this table holds everything you’ve ever pinned on Pinterest.
You can search for your pins via a board, category or keyword and see what has performed well over a set time period. Then you can repin your top performing content.
Now that you know what’s popular, you can reschedule this content to other relevant boards, or even to the same board. It’s a great way to boost traffic from old posts and expose it to your Pinterest followers who may have missed it the first time.
In the screenshot below I searched the keyword “Australia” and these three blog posts have had decent engagement so I simply click on the Schedule a Repin button on the right.
7. RSS Feed Management for Pinterest
This is still in BETA but a new cool feature is that you can create a list of your favourite blogs and build your own personal feed.
Under the Content Discovery tab in your dashboard you simply add in the URLs of blogs and it pulls content from their site automatically.
This just makes content easier to find and pin from the people you already know and trust.
In the screenshot below you can see a list of blogs I’ve started adding on the left, and on the right you can search and filter by:
Recent
Trending
Popular
And on each image, the Tailwind icon displays how much engagement each post has already had on Pinterest.
8. Outsourcing Tailwind is Easy
Because we have built our blog into a full-time business and our Pinterest following is large, we have outsourced important tasks to our virtual assistant Bryanna, and one of those is the management of our Pinterest marketing efforts.
I still play around on the Pinterest app on my phone, but Bryanna currently runs 95% of our Tailwind activities.
Tailwind App is simple to use and they make it easy to invite collaborators. I asked Bryanna to share her own thoughts and this is what she said:
“I like using Tailwind for scheduling Pinterest Pins for multiple reasons. It is helpful how it tells you if you have pinned from the same URL before. That way you don’t repin something that you have recently pinned to your board. The scheduling portion is great because you can set intervals if you are pinning the same image to multiple boards and you can also schedule it to go into the auto-queue. Tailwind App takes a lot of the guess work out of scheduling pins. Their interface is also very user-friendly and it is easy to tell how many pins you have scheduled and when they will go out”
Bryanna has a growing team of virtual assistants and if you’d like to learn more about her services visit VirtualPowerhouse.com.
Training videos
Getting started with Tailwind App is easy.
In the members area they have 5 training videos that walk you through everything step-by-step and in more detail than this blog post.
There are more than 8 reasons to get started with Tailwind, but this post would be never ending so I’ll let the experts explain the rest of their cool features!
There’s also an in-depth FAQ section and if you get stuck with anything their customer service is responsive and helpful.
What about Scheduled pins VS Live pins?
I know you probably have this question because I did too.
Is it true you shouldn’t schedule too much because the smart feed can see this and prefers a real person to be pinning? Do we need to be careful about over-scheduling because we won’t show up as high in the smart feed?
So I wrote to the support desk at Tailwind and asked them directly. And this is what Danny, the founder and CEO, had to say:
“Hi Craig, we’ve heard that rumor flying around and inquired with Pinterest, but they confirmed it’s only a rumor. Scheduled pins are not treated any differently from live pins, as long as they are scheduled through an approved / official partner application. The Smart Feed naturally throttles the number of pins that can show in a given timeframe from a single Pinner. So, it’s possible that live pinning can lead to a lower percentage of your pins showing in the Smart Feed, especially if multiple pins are saved in close proximity to each other. That’s one of the big reasons experienced Pinners schedule in the first place – to smooth out “binge pinning” sessions.”
LOVE that answer!!
You’ll be happy to know that Tailwind is an inaugural partner of Pinterest Marketing Developer Partner program for content publishing.
Free trial
You can get started with Tailwind on a free trial, and there is no time limit on this!
Your free trial includes a trial of 100 scheduled pins. That means that after you’ve scheduled and published 100 pins you can no longer publish pins and you will be prompted to upgrade.
There isn’t a time limit for the 100 pins, either, and no credit card required.
Pricing and plans
I have the Tailwind PLUS account which is $15 per month, or if you do what I do and pay a one-time annual payment of $120 you get 4 months free and your monthly payment comes down to $9.99 per month.
The plus account is perfect for bloggers and small businesses. There are other accounts for large brands.
For $9.99 per month you get unlimited Pin Scheduling (400 pins per month on the $15 monthly plan) and all these other features I’ve just talked about.
Conclusion
Is Tailwind App worth the investment?
All I can say is that it makes running my account that much easier, I’m able to be more strategic in my Pinterest marketing efforts and it saves us a ton of time!
Of course not every pin will go viral, but if you can increase the performance of your average pins that leads to substantial increases in traffic and followers, which can lead to more chances of your pins going viral.
To be able to manage all my Pinterest content creation, publishing, analytics and reporting in one place and to accomplish hours of Pinterest marketing in minutes, the small monthly fee is more than worth it.
As I said at the beginning, if you want to get serious about Pinterest and potentially outsource your Pinterest marketing efforts as we have done, Tailwind is a no brainer!
If you like what you’ve read and Tailwind sounds right for you, we’d greatly appreciate you signing up via our affiliate link.
Do you use Tailwind App for your Pinterest marketing?
Share your experience in the comments. Or ask us any question about Tailwind or Pinterest.
8 Ways Tailwind App Improves My Pinterest Marketing Results
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