How To Use Tailwind To Supercharge Your Pinterest Account

Today’s post isn’t about beauty, but I hope you still find it interesting and/or useful. I’m going to introduce you to an incredible little tool called Tailwind which can help you to really boost your engagement and traffic on Pinterest.

If you are just a casual user of Pinterest then a Pinterest scheduler like Tailwind will not be a high priority, but if you’re a blogger or a business then this amazing website could become an important part of your strategy. Hopefully you will find this post helpful and will end up loving Tailwind as much as I do. This information is partly formed from my own experiences, and partly from attending training provided by Pinterest.

Let’s start with the basics. Why should you use Pinterest?

• If you are sharing your content on the internet (whether that’s a blog post, artwork, or selling your hand-whittled aardvark figurines) then Pinterest is a fantastic way to share it and get you noticed. It’s a beautiful site that combines the most inspirational, fantastical images (Impossibly clean homes! Impossibly clean children!) with the most down to earth, relatable tutorials and tips.
• It’s great for inspiration: whether that’s fashion, home decor, make up, blog tips… you will find it all here. Interestingly, Pinterest do not see themselves as a social media site – they class themselves as a visual search engine. If I’m looking for a recipe or tutorial or inspiration I will always search on Pinterest before Google, which is a pretty interesting shift when you think about how much Google used to dominate internet search.
• Finally, the best thing about Pinterest is that it’s ridiculously fun! If you love Pinterest as much as me, you can follow me HERE.

I’m going to be doing more in depth tips for Pinterest, but the first and most important tip is that you should be pinning regularly. It’s like with any content sharing site: your content can’t be seen if you’re not posting the content…

… And this is where Tailwind comes in. Since I started using Tailwind, at the end of last year, I have gained over 6,000 Pinterest followers – almost doubling the number of followers I had when I started! But more importantly, that boost in followers has resulted in the traffic to my blog has drastically increasing (FYI followers on Pinterest aren’t an indicator of your reach or value on the site so please bear that in mind when you start to work on your account).

Pinterest is now consistently listed as my number one traffic source – even in front of Google – which is incredible and so much more important to me than being able to say that I have xyz number of followers! Read on to hear how Tailwind helped me get more blog traffic.

Before we get into the nitty gritty of Tailwind, you can click THIS LINK* to get a free month of Tailwind and – full disclosure – I get a small credit on my account for referring you. So it’s a win-win! This is not a sponsored post: I have used Tailwind since November ’16, I pay for it myself, and I genuinely love it. You can try a month for free to see how you get on with the platform, and then after that it’s about $13 a month which I think is a bargain for the information and benefits it provides.

I’ve put some screenshots below from my Pinterest analytics, showing how my average monthly views/engagement (left) and my website visits (right) have increased drastically since I started using Tailwind. I don’t like to toot my own horn but a 313% increase of average monthly views of my pins and a 650% increase of daily clicks is seriously impressive! So, toot toot!

Between November ’16 and March ’17, I was pinning ~20 images a day. Then at the beginning of March I bumped it up to ~40 pins a day. And you can clearly see the jump in the graphs above. Now that you’ve heard about the results, let’s backtrack for a minute…

What On Earth Is Tailwind?

It’s a website that connects to your Pinterest account and allows you to schedule pins – it’s as simple as that! It suggests time slots that fit with your audience and even suggests similar pins to the ones you’re posting.

How Do You Schedule Pins?

I downloaded the Tailwind Chrome browser extension which means that any time I’m on a blog/website/article, I can click the little button in the bottom left corner (left hand image below). When you’re on Pinterest, a little Tailwind bird appears in the top corner of each image (as you can see in the screenshot on the right, below). Once you click those buttons a box pops up, allowing you to schedule that image into your timeline. Both of these additions make it really easy for you to schedule on the go. But more about scheduling later…

(BTW that beautiful palette photo above is taken from Hayley’s blog)

Tailwind’s free account lets you schedule up to 100 pins a month, so you can try it out to see if you like it without parting with any money. I used the free account for about a month or so before upgrading to the ‘Plus’ plan, which is $9.99 a month (if you pay yearly).

My Tips For Scheduling

I would recommend starting by scheduling ~5 pins a day to see how you get on and then build up if you want to! At the moment, Tailwind pins ~50 images a day for me and it happens automatically at evenly spaced time periods so that I can just forget about it. I’ve put an image below that shows my current schedule: the opaque green slots are my existing ones, and the white, dotted-line ones are further slots being suggested by Tailwind to best fit with my audience. This is so helpful as a large number of my audience are based in the US, and obviously I can’t be awake all night pinning in order to target them!

It should go without saying that you still need to actually spend the time scheduling to fill your slots. I probably spend about an hour a week setting up my pins for the following week – but as I love using Pinterest I don’t really mind it. Plus, having a schedule means that Tailwind can be pinning for you while you’re on holiday or if you have a really busy period coming up. Knowing that my Pinterest is sorted while I focus on other things is such a relief!

Posting 50 pins a day may seem excessive, but bear in mind that I try to pin 80% content from my blog and 20% from other content creators, so that’s 40 pins of my own content per day… considering I have 8 years of blog posts in my back catalogue, that’s more than enough to fill a schedule! Plus, I’ll often pin one image to several boards – e.g. a single image could fit on my Unwearable Lex board, my Essie Nails Board, and my Warm Toned Eye Make Up board – so your schedule often fills up a lot quicker than you’d expect.

Other Benefits Of Tailwind

Another thing I have found really helpful about Tailwind is that it also offers much better analytics than the Pinterest back-end. The analytics are a great way to tweak and target my content better and therefore grow my following. Knowing your audience is key to gaining more followers on Pinterest and so you should be checking your analytics at least once a month to make sure you are on track.

Lastly – in case you heard the same horror stories as me and were wondering – Tailwind is approved by Pinterest so you don’t have to worry about your account being suspended for using it!

*Breaaaaathe* And that’s how I increased my engagement and traffic on Pinterest! I hope you have found this post helpful, and I hope you try out Tailwind and love it as much as me. Please leave me your Pinterest links in the comments – I always love finding fresh blood for my timeline!

Don’t forget that if you sign up using THIS LINK* you can get a free month of Tailwind to see if you like it (and I also get a referral credit) so we both get a treat!

http://www.pinterest.com/talontedlex

Lex

*As mentioned above, this is not a sponsored post. I paid for my own Tailwind subscription and will continue to do so. However, if you sign up using my affiliate link, we both get a bonus!

== SAVE ME TO PINTEREST TO READ LATER!! ==