Trumpeter Media uses affiliate marketing. An affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to this product and affiliated sites. Other affiliate links may be used in this article, but they do not impact on the price that you pay (in fact you get to use my discounts!) and they help me to get this information to you for free.
Ask most online business owners and bloggers where they get the most traffic from and usually there are two sources – Google organic traffic and Pinterest. Pinterest is a visual search engine and can be a huge driver of traffic but there’s definitely a strong element of strategy to it that requires consistency. This can take up a huge amount of time! And that’s why investing in a tool like Tailwind is crucial to success with Pinterest. Here’s a Tailwind review explaining what Tailwind is and what it does.
Benefits of Tailwind
Tailwind is a paid scheduling tool and one of the top ones that is approved by Pinterest. This is very important because if you ever encountered BoardBooster, this is the story of using a non-approved scheduler. People had their Pinterest accounts banned at one point!
But with Tailwind you are okay. In fact, the team actually develop their features with people from Pinterest, so you know everything is good to use. And the benefits of using the tool are primarily that you can be consistent in your pinning without it taking much time. Using it, you can easily schedule a week’s content in an hour or less rather than having to spend multiple short periods of time every day going into Pinterest to add those pins.
Another big benefit of the app is that it has built-in analytics. Now Pinterest’s analytics recently got an overhaul and they are better but still a bit lacking when compared with something like Google Analytics. However, Tailwind has a range of information to help you fine-tune your strategy including board and pin inspectors as well as general weekly figures.
Using Tailwind for Pinterest
When you first start to use Tailwind for Pinterest, the starting place is your smart schedule. This is where Tailwind looks at your Pinterest account and you tell it how many times a day you want to pin. It then selects slots based on when your profile is active, spread out across the day.
Once you have set that up, you are ready to start adding your pins. There are three ways to do this:
- Use the browser extension you can download from Tailwind to add any pin on the browser page to your queue
- Use the extension on Pinterest to either schedule one or a bunch of pins
- Use the ‘create new pin’ in the Drafts section of the Publisher to upload an image, add the URL and description and then add to your queue
Tailwind automatically adds new pins to the next available spot, but you can control this. When scheduling a pin, there is the option to add to the queue or to hit the clock icon. This opens up the custom time box. You can choose the exact time and date you want to schedule the pin.
If you are sending it to more than one board (which is good practice) then you can use either available slots, optimised on a set pattern or exact. For example, if you choose to send each version of the pin 24 hours apart but your queue is full for a week, the optimised option will add a time slot approximately 24 hours after the first pin for the second one and so on. If you use ‘exact’, it will pin it exactly 24 hours later.
Tailwind Review – Other Publisher tools
Within the Publisher menu on Tailwind, there are also some other tools worth checking out. There’s the Scheduled Pins section which shows all of the pins you have added to the queue and are waiting to be pinned. You can also view Published Pins where you can see everything you have pinned in reverse chronological order.
Another handy tool within Tailwind is the Board Lists. This is where you can create lists of boards and easily add a pin to all of the boards in it. So let’s say there’s a Pin about Thailand – the board list for Thailand could include the main Thailand board, an Asia board and also the basic blog boards such as a ‘best of’.
Finally, if you are an Instagram user, you can connect your IG account to Pinterest and easily add these images to Pinterest. You can go into the Instagram section on Publisher and find the most recent or most popular images and then pin them to your relevant boards.
Smart Loop
The most recent addition to the Tailwind app is the Smart Loop. If you ever used BoardBooster, this feature is similar to their looping feature but much smarter. You get 250 free loops on a standard account and 1 pin to 1 board counts as 1 loop. They are ongoing rather than time-based.
You can also upgrade to add more loops, right up to the highest plan that allows you unlimited loops. If you have a limited number, it is worth starting with the most popular pins and recycle them to your best boards. It has built-in spam warnings, so you don’t have to worry about repinning too often and every pin that goes through Smart Loop counts as a new pin with a new URL.
Tribes
The other big bonus of using Tailwind is Tribes. Tribes are a bit like group boards but are hosted on the app rather than on Pinterest. Anyone can start one and you get five free Tribe memberships with a basic plan as well as an allowance of 30 pins a month. You can upgrade this as with Smart Loop and if you make a Tribe of your own, this doesn’t count towards your limit.
Tribes is a little more manual than other Tailwind features but are worth the effort. By adding content every day to Tribes you can drive a substantial amount of traffic even on a free plan. And it is also a great place to find content to pin from, which is best done once a week.
Using Tailwind for Instagram
If you are an Instagram user, you can also use Tailwind for Instagram. There’s a free 30 post trial to give it a try and then it is a separate subscription if you want to use it. The basics work much like Pinterest scheduling – you can add images and captions to your queue, and they are automatically posted to your IG account.
Another handy feature is the hashtag finder. This helps you find relevant hashtags and grades them based on number of uses to help you get a mixture. Tailwind is also developing new features for their Instagram accounts so if you are a big IG user, this is definitely worth checking out.
Save time with Pinterest
The key point from this Tailwind review is that you can save a lot of time when you use Tailwind for Pinterest and also for Instagram. You can get that consistency that is hard to manage manually, check what is working and drive more traffic with their extra features.
If you want to see more of the plans that Tailwind offers and grab a free trial, you can check it out here
If you enjoyed this article you might also like to read about pinterest analytics
One thought on “Tailwind Review”