Pinterest may be more known as a social media network for sharing recipe ideas, blog posts, and décor inspiration. But, the site also doubles as one of the biggest search engines on the web. Your posts on Pinterest – aka “Pins” – live up to 1,600 times longer than on Facebook or any other platform:
Although it is often lumped in with social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, Pinterest is actually a visual search engine. Yes, you can share images on Pinterest like you do on Instagram and Facebook, and it will refer traffic to your site. However, the way people use Pinterest and the way the algorithm delivers content is very different.
Why Pinterest can be helpful for your blog
Here are some Pinterest statistics that should make you sit up and take notice of the platform:
- As of the Q4 2019, Pinterest has more than 335 million monthly active users
- 90% of weekly pinners have used Pinterest to make a purchase
- 40% of Pinterest users have a household income of $100,000
- There were 600 million Pinterest Lens searches in February 2018
- 59% of millenials have discovered products on Pinterest
People use Pinterest to plan moments in their lives and to research products and ideas to improve their lives. Much of Pinterest’s content is aspirational. People use it like a dream board of things they want to do and accomplish in their lives, personally and professionally. They are looking for products or services to fill their lifestyle and professional needs and enjoy viewing the images on Pinterest to get ideas and learn about trends. Given the way people use Pinterest to search and shop, most every business should investigate using Pinterest to expand their reach online.
With that being said, Pinterest can be a very powerful marketing platform, but it takes a lot of time and effort to follow the suggested 10-15 pins per day. And the easiest way we’ve found to do so is by scheduling Pins into a queue so that there’s always fresh content on deck. Here are some Pinterest scheduling, dashboard, and analytics tools to help you grow your Pinterest organically and quickly.
Read more: Pinterest Tips: How to Successfully Create and Apply to Join Pinterest Group Boards
Pinterest scheduling and dashboard tools
1. Tailwind
Tailwind is a complete Pinterest management tool with some pretty neat analytics options. In addition to scheduling and the standard stats, you can analyze your competitors, see trending pints, top repinners, and your most influential followers.
Pros
- You can easily upload new content from different sources including Dropbox and iOS
- The Smart Queue helps you to pin at the optimal times
- Tailwind lets you create multiple posts at once from any page on the internet with the web Browser Extension
- It helps you to quickly schedule pins with Board Lists
- You can join like-minded people in your Tribes to share helpful content and grow your audience
Cons
- No image cropping and editing
- No interval scheduling (the ability to schedule images at set intervals like every 5 minutes)
Tailwind also has three unique built in features that can save you a lot of time when creating and scheduling pins:
- You can group themed boards into global boards for one-time, multi-board pinning: This feature lets you pin to one global board, and it’ll also go to lots of other individual boards assigned to it with one click. Thus, the global boards through Tailwind will be titled “boards” to distinguish them from standard Pinterest boards.
- The ability to space out those group pins in your chosen intervals to prevent redundancy: In this case, if you have 7 boards in a global board, the same pin can be pinned over a certain period of once a day, once every other day, etc.
- Your pin deck can be shuffled around while keeping the interval pins above locked in place at a given time: This feature allows you to upload up to 1,000 pins into your queue, click a button to randomize all of them, but still keep the interval pins in the bullet above locked in your chosen schedule.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that although Tailwind now has Instagram scheduling and publishing feature, most of the features are channeled towards Pinterest, and that’s the network we’ll focus more on for this Tailwind review and tutorial.
Pro tip: Create a free Tailwind account and start joining tribes to share your content and receive Pin saves from others within your niche! Let us know how you like Tailwind in the comments.
Pricing: free trial to start, $10/month afterwards
2. Buffer
Find great images to Pin from any website and immediately add to your Pinterest schedule with the Buffer browser extension. Likewise, if you’re browsing Pinterest and spot something that’d fit for your board, you can Pin again with a click of a button.
Also, you can come back to your dashboard to see all the stats from your Pins—likes, comments, and repins—right alongside your other social media stats, saving you huge amounts of time by having all this in one place.
Pricing: Unlimited Pinning starts with the $10/month Awesome plan. You can also try Buffer for Pinterest free for seven days.
3. Viraltag
With ViralTag, you can browse from a preselected set of images or upload your own and schedule to Pinterest as well as Twitter, Facebook, and others.
Known as a social media marketing tool for automating content sharing, Viraltag allows you to manage multiple social networks, discover great content, schedule unlimited posts, recycle top performing content, collaborate with your team, and analyze performance – all from a single dashboard.
Pricing: Free for three social profiles. Paid plans start at $24 per month.
4. ViralWoot
Formerly called Pinwoot (and no relation to ViralTag, mentioned above), ViralWoot offers several interesting Pinterest features like scheduling via bookmarklet, follower growth tools, pin alerts, and even a bit of advertising.
Pricing: Free starter plan, then $12/month and up
5. Quintly
A good Pinterest tool for competitor page analysis is Quintly. You can also analyse your own Pinterest page with it. The results are displayed in graphs to help you compare your performance against your competitors easily.
You can also analyse your blog and other networks like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin and Google Plus. As the graphs are all displayed in the same place your Pinterest results will be easy to compare against other networks.
The only problem is that it doesn’t track the clicks on your pins. This can be a problem as most businesses use Pinterest to drive traffic.
Pricing: Starting at $129
6. True Social Metrics
If you want to analyse more social networks (along with your Pinterest page) then True Social Metrics will be perfect for you. It analyses all the social networks Quintly does and it also has analytics for other networks like Slideshare and Vimeo.
If your WordPress blog plays a key role in your Pinterest marketing strategy then you should try them out as they offer very good blog analytics.
The main problem with them is the price as to get Pinterest analytics you need to sign up for the Premium pack.
Pricing: Starting at $100 monthly
Read more: Pinterest Monthly Views: What Does it Mean?
Tools for growing your community
7. PinGroupie
Find group boards on Pinterest where you can join and contribute. PinGroupie has options for sorting boards by popularity so you can quickly see those with the biggest following, or most pins or likes.
Pricing: Free
8. Pinvolve
Here’s a cool time saver for those who share lots to Pinterest and Facebook: Pinvolve converts your Facebook photos into Pins and places your Pins on your Facebook page. Simple as that. The Pro version does it all automatically, or you can do a bit of manual moving around in the free version.
Pricing: Free, or Pro plans starting at $9/month
9. LoveList
The LoveList iOS app lets you scan any product’s barcode and create a Pin to share to Pinterest. Some fun use cases: Pin all the products from your product line, or create a wish list for your kids or your friends.
Update: LoveList appears to have closed shop.
10. Loop88
This Pinterest tool connects Pinterest influencers—those with big followers and engaged audiences—with advertisers and brands who want to spread their message on Pinterest. The result: Increased exposure, repins, and followers when an influencer shares your Pin with their audience.
Pricing: Contact for a quote
11. PinAlerts
A free Pinterest tool that’s sort of like Google Alerts, will email you every time your website receives a new pin on Pinterest. You can decide how frequently you want to be alerted: daily, weekly or as it happens. The emails include a link to the latest pins with a description. Receive email notifications whenever someone pins something from your website or the website of a competitor.
Pro tip for creating VIRAL content: Join active group boards within your niche! Group boards are often founded by active members with large Pinterest followings, with some luck and quality content, they’ll save your pins for their audience to look. This is a great way to attract eyeballs onto your content from Pinterest accounts larger than yours! Group boards are started and moderated by one account and then they can invite other Pinterest users to join the board and also pin to it. When so, done is invited to a board, it shows on their account and they can pin to the board. Read more about how to join Pinterest group boards.
Image creation tools
12. Pinstamatic
With Pinstamatic, you can create a smart-looking pin out of anything: a website, some text, a Spotify song, a Twitter profile, a map location, and even more. Pinstamatic builds the image automatically for you, then you can share immediately to Pinterest.
What Makes Pinstamatic a Cool Pinterest Tool
- It is FREE
- Its easy-to-use, even for non-tech folks.
- You get neat pinnable images for quotes, photos and more in minutes.
Price: Free
13. Canva
Canva is a graphic design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content. It is available on web and mobile, and integrates millions of images, fonts, templates and illustrations. One of our favorite image editing tools no matter the size, Canva has a ready-made Pinterest template complete with tons of different starter designs. The image comes out an optimized 2:3 aspect ratio, perfect for Pinning.
Price: Free
14. Pablo
Buffer has a built a quick-and-simple image creation tool that’s designed to make image building as fast as possible. You can start with some of our preloaded quotes or add your own text. One of my favorite features is the ability to add some branding by uploading a secondary image, in this case a logo.
Price: Free
15. Share as Image
With tons of useful customization options, Share As Image lets you build an image from text. With the Chrome extension installed, you can select text from any website and build an image based on your highlight. There’s even an option for a Pinterest-optimized canvas size.
Note: Share as Image has renamed, and is now available at https://getstencil.com
Price: $8 per month
16. Pic Monkey
A free image-editing tool—think of an online Photoshop lite—Pic Monkey can help you create just about any image you’d like, with any feature you might need. You can touch up and edit an existing image or create a brand new image from scratch. And perhaps my favorite feature of Pic Monkey is that you can get started without ever logging in or signing up; just click the “Edit for free!” link in the very top right corner.
Price: Free, or plans starting at $5/month
17. Piktochart
Piktochart’s interactive layouts allow you to build a complete infographic embedding charts, photos, and more. You can get started with a prebuilt template (and then customize yourself) or you can go truly bare bones and build the entire infographic however you see fit. Piktochart comes with a huge number of icons, shapes, and objects that you can easily add into your editor.
Pricing: Free
Additional infographic tools:
- Infogr.am – Embed video, maps, charts, and more into your infographic
- Visual.ly – Connect with professional designers to help with your project
- Easel.ly
- Venngage
18. Quozio
A tool to help with creating images from quotes, Quozio works both as a web app and as a bookmarklet. In the web app, all you’ll need to do is enter the quote and who said it, then choose the Quozio template design that you like best.
Pricing: Free
Additional tools to create images from text:
19. Page2Images
Page2Images is a handy tool that takes a full-screen picture of a webpage and lets you easily download or add to Pinterest. There are a pair of bookmarklets that you can install by clicking and dragging the links to your bookmarks bar—one bookmarklet adds straight to Pinterest, and the other grabs the page as an image to download.
Pricing: Free
20. Over
We’ve touched on how to turn text into images. How about sprucing up an image with text over the top?
The Over app for iOS and Android lets you choose any image on your device and customize with text, fonts, colors, and type sizes of your choosing.
Pricing: Free
Additional mobile apps:
Pinterest tools for your website
21. Digg Digg WordPress plugin
If you have pages on your site that are fit to be Pinned—cool visuals or useful blog posts, for instance—it’s a great benefit to have an easy way for readers to share to Pinterest. We’ve added a Pinterest button to the sidebar of our blog posts, using the Digg Digg plugin, and we’ve noticed our blog post pins go from dozens to hundreds.
Pricing: Free
Other WordPress sharing plugins:
22. SumoMe Image Sharer
Among SumoMe’s suite of website tools is their free image sharer, which places a smooth sharing overlay on top of any images on your site, allowing people to quickly share to Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and others.
Pricing: Free
23. Pinterest widgets
This free list of tools from Pinterest allow you to quite fully integrate your Pinterest presence with your website. Here are the five widgets that Pinterest offers:
- Pin It Button – allows people to pin things from your website.
- Follow Button – allows people to follow you on Pinterest from your website.
- Pin Widget – lets you embed one of your pins on your site.
- Profile Widget – displays up to 30 of your latest pins on your site.
- Board Widget – displays up to 30 of your favorite board’s latest pins.
Pricing: Free
Enterprise options
There are a bunch of cool tools and brands that were part of Pinterest’s Marketing Developer Partners (MDP) program. Many of the tools involved here were focused on enterprise businesses; Buffer and Tailwind were two of the small-business-focused tools.
Here’s a list of the others involved in Pinterest’s MDP.
- Ahalogy – Complete Pinterest marketing services
- Curalate – Image discovery tool
- Expion – Social media management, content, and analytics solution
- NewsCred – Content marketing software
- Percolate – All-in-one solution for all your marketing—planning, production, promotion
- Shoutlet – Social media marketing platform
- Spredfast – Software for digital marketing, TV, live events, and more
- Sprinklr – A suite of products to help with all forms of digital marketing
These are the Pinterest tools you can use to manage your page and overall presence. As aforementioned you don’t have to use all of them. Just browse through the main advantages and disadvantages of the tools. Then pick your favourite and trial them. Many of them have free trials. After you trial them you will find the perfect one.
Which of the above Pinterest tools have you used? What other Pinterest tools do you use to manage your page? Please leave your comments below.
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