I’m guessing most have heard of Pinterest by now and some consider it a “social media.” However, it is soooo much more than that. It’s basically a visual search engine where people go to find anything from wedding planning inspiration and their next outfit they want to purchase to business tips and tutorials. But have you heard of Tailwind? If not I will be sharing how I use Tailwind for Pinterest success at Proof & Parchment. I did make a brief mention of Tailwind (referral link) in a post on the top business tools I recommend here.
As a business owner there are a ton of reasons to use Pinterest. Here are just a few ways I use it:
- Custom boards for branding projects
- Business tips
- Self promotion of my blog & shop
- Trend research
- Affiliate links
- Finding tutorials for new skills
So while I use Pinterest all of those ways the biggest impact on Proof & Parchment is by pinning content from my blog and shop which is where Tailwind comes into play.
Tailwind for Pinterest
Tailwind (referral link) is considered a pin scheduler which seems simple enough. But once you dig in it does a lot more than just schedule pins. The features that I love include Tribes, Smartloop, Insights, and Smart Schedule. Using all of these features has optimized my Pinterest boards and has increased my overall traffic to my content on the web. It can take time for the results to start to show but it is worth the time investment to set it all up. Now I’ll jump into the details of each feature I love plus I’ll share the results of using Tailwind for Pinterest so far!
Tribes
While using Tailwind to schedule all of my pins is fantastic, the addition of Tribes made the biggest impact for my Pinterest strategy. A tribe is a group of similar Tailwind users where you can share your pins for them to repin. There are a ton of tribes to pick from in a variety of categories. Some are public while others you have to request to join. I am in tribes relating to Etsy sellers, bloggers, creative entrepreneurs, & more. Each tribe has their own rules you have to follow to maintain membership. Depending on your tribe membership level will affect how many tribes you can join and how many pins you can add to the tribes. But even at the lowest membership tier you can positively impact your Pinterest page.
SmartLoop
Another fun feature Tailwind has is SmartLoop. This feature can get a little complex but simply put, it is a way to automatically loop content on Pinterest. This is especially great for popular blog posts. Since there’s so much content on Pinterest the chances of someone seeing a pin the first time is slim so it’s helpful to repin items over time. And SmartLoop helps do this effectively without over pinning the same content. Plus once you set it up you don’t have to micromanage it which is one less thing to worry about!
Smart Schedule
Smart schedule is another great feature in Tailwind and saves me so much time. All you really have to do is set up the schedule with how many times you want to pin a day and then it will optimize the best times to pin. That’s it! Then you just schedule pins either in the app or with the chrome extension and it will auto populate the next open times. It really doesn’t get any easier. All I have to do is go on a Tailwind pin scheduling binge like once a week to fill in the open times and I’m done.
Insights
Pinterest has it’s own analytics and so does Tailwind. Within Tailwind’s insights there are a variety of stats that are helpful to track. My favorite areas to check would be the board insights and the pin inspector. Both of these show me what is doing well on my Pinterest page which then helps me determine what type of items to continue pinning in the future. There are additional features within the insights that I’m sure I could gain even more information from and maybe will in the future!
Pinterest + Tailwind & Results
Overall I find the items I pin from Tribes, Pinterest searches, and my favorite blogs along with my own content mixed in. You definitely need to share the love with other’s content to keep Pinterest happy and your page balanced.
It has now been about a year since I have been actively using Tailwind to improve my Pinterest page. Here are a few stats from May 2018 to May 2019
- Average monthly viewers: 40,456 (May 2018) to 2,267,896 (May 2019)
- Average monthly engaged: 856 (May 2018) to 75,256 (May 2019)
I haven’t been able to directly quantify how these stats have impacted my business. However the increase in viewers & engagement can most likely be correlated to these stats from the past year:
- Increase email subscribers
- Increase blog traffic
- Pinterest is number one traffic to blog
- Etsy traffic from Pinterest increased from 4% to 12%
I will continue to monitor these numbers along with looking out for other direct impacts of using Tailwind for Pinterest. Be sure to check out Tailwind (referral link) if you want to up your own Pinterest game!
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