A few months ago, I wrote a post about my trial period with BoardBooster. I loved it. It was a very easy to use program and it virtually automated all my Pinterest activity.
However, in the months since, Pinterest announced strategic partnerships with a select few companies. BoardBooster was not among them. They then tweaked their search algorithm to favor those who use their partner sites (and good old-fashioned personal pinning) and my referrals began to sink.
My guess is that a program that is completely hands-off, while convenient for people like me, don’t contribute to engagement on Pinterest, and therefore are not what Pinterest wants people using. Makes sense, really.
So, I started looking around at alternatives. I was accepted as a member of Ahalogy recently, so I use that, though rarely. Another blogger recommended Viral Tag, so I started a free trial with them, too. Then I found Tailwind, and set up a free trial there, too. Yes, that’s a lot of trials.
I’ll be totally honest and say that free trials are a ginormous pain in the patoot and take a huge amount of work that may or may pay off, but they’re worth it in that you get to try things out and see what makes the most sense for you.
The advantage to Viral Tag is that you can manage most of your social media there. But since I’m already pretty adept at HootSuite, I didn’t want to change everything. Plus, it’s not an approved Pinterest partner, and I was worried about having to switch again in the future.
I should also point out that there are a number of Pinterest supported partners that you could choose from. You can see them all in this release from Pinterest. I did not look into all of them. I had heard good things about Ahalogy and Tailwind, so that’s where I started.
I can sum up why I chose Tailwind over Ahalogy in 1 word: Analytics.
What are analytics and why should you care about them?
Think of analytics this way; it’s like measuring your blog’s pulse, blood pressure, blood sugar, EKG, brain waves, and any other test you can think of all the time.
In Tailwind, you can track which group boards gain you the most repins or traffic. What time of day is best to post. If you use Pinterest to sell things, it will track that, too. This is information you can use to revise your pinning to be more effective with the same amount of effort. For example, though it feels wrong to me, I now set up most of my pins to be posted in the evening because the information I get from Tailwind tells me that’s when my pins get the most repins and click-throughs.
Now, for those of you who love BoardBooster’s hands-off pinning tool, this is definitely more work. You have to schedule your own pins, which can take some time. But, if Pinterest is one of your biggest referrers, like it is mine, I think the time and energy are worth it.
The other thing I really like about Tailwind is the visual scheduler. I find it much easier to see all my pins laid out than to look at a list. It helps me spread pins out so the same pin isn’t getting posted (to different boards) 3 times in a row).
Beautiful!
The best part is that my repins and page views are rebounding since I started using Tailwind.
If you’d like to try Tailwind, you can get a free trial of 100 pins by clicking here. I highly recommend evaluating multiple programs to see what works for you since we all have different needs and situations.
Related Note: I’ve been very open about how much the Elite Blog Academy has helped my blog. When I started I had about 500 page views a month, and within 8 months that grew to over 13,000! I truly believe it is the single best investment you can make in your blog. This weekend, for 48 hours only, Ruth is offering the Elite Blog Academy course for it’s original price of $299 (it’s since gone up to $399, so this is a great deal). Want in on this amazing opportunity? CLICK HERE
