Perhaps one of the biggest things interface designers of this age introduced that resulted in hours of time wasted on social media is the Infinite scroll!
We’re looking at you, Pinterest and Instagram.
Pinterest, with its cascading waterfall layout, saw over 100 million signups in 2020 alone. Despite being started over 11 years ago, in 2021, it is still the 14th largest globally active platform.
And it does have a certain something that separates it from the crowd. Pinterest is a visual discovery engine that works on a unique business model.
Why Pinterest?
Pinterest focuses exclusively on discovery, which means it does not gatekeep images. People can upload images with the appropriate tags for the whole world to see.
It takes the focus away from the account and earlier did not even offer private chatting or commenting options (Times have changed though and both are available now).
With its use of pinboards, Pinterest can act as a portfolio site as well. The advertisement model allows different modes – one can work with a CPC or CPM model, or opt to display paid adverts. On the whole, it’s a great place to get discovered as the Pinterest algorithm has received many favourable reviews over the years.
As a seller, you can also link multiple e-commerce sites on a single picture and use pinboards to display different segments of products. It also makes link sharing out of the platform easier. It’s quite understandable why it is seen as an effective marketing tool.
This is why now, we’re going to look at some of the best Pinterest marketing tools. These tools can make managing hundreds of images easier. Starting from offering creation libraries to the ability to schedule posts, find the right groups to contribute to, getting comment notifications and even sharing beyond Pinterest to multiple platforms – we’ve looked at options for them all.
With these tools and some working knowledge of how the platform works – you’re good to get started today!
1. Tailwind
Tailwind is a marketing and management tool made exclusively for Pinterest and Instagram. It comes with its own Chrome Extension.
Tailwind’s narrowing down to only 2 social channels allows it to be a more comprehensive tool than the rest. Which is great if you want to focus exclusively on Pinterest.
Tailwind has its own editor where you can touch up images or creates ones completely from scratch. The editor comes with presets as well to save time.
You can add your own brand styles and colours and save the theme for future use. Once done, you can create a scheduling pattern and then add a series of images as a queue. Apart from that, you can schedule specific images for specific times.
However, Tailwind goes one step ahead and allows you to choose an automated time based on earlier feedback of when users are the most active! This increases the chances of your pins being recognised manifold.
For visual planning, Tailwind allows a dummy feed that you can go through. For analytics, one can look at repins, likes, comments, follower growth or decline – which is the standard.
Along with this – you can also check the Virality Score of each pin. It also has a Hashtag Finder that you can use to explore topics and decide what to capitalise on. It’s a great all-in-one tool for Pinterest, starting from 9.99 USD per month.
2. Buffer
It is rare to not see Buffer on any tool list related to social media management. In 2015, Buffer partnered with Pinterest to introduce its Buffer for Pinterest allows you to effectively link both and perform tasks in one place. With Buffer, you can add pins on images globally, as well as schedule your own pins.
Buffer allows schedule creation on a day-to-day or weekly basis. To keep posting in the schedule, you can create a queue of images and add them in a specific order.
Buffer will keep posting them as per the dates one by one. You can keep adding more to the queue as needed. Once you add an image, Buffer will pin it automatically onto your account.
Moreover, you can post the image beyond Pinterest onto other social media sites like Linkedin and Facebook. Buffer Analytics will allow you to see the overall performance of each pin. This includes the number of repins, engagement, follower increase and so on. You can see these analytics for an individual pin or for an entire board.
Buffer is available as a browser extension which makes it very easy to use and open up. And it does have a free plan that allows you to manage up to 3 channels! With the 5 USD per month plan, you can get unlimited channels. However, payment for adding new team members to the project is extra.
3. PinGroupie
Similar to Facebook groups, Pinterest groups are groups that contain like-minded people who have come together to share and learn a specific passion.
If you’re selling a specific product, finding the right group to market it in could be a huge step towards getting more conversions. After all, hyper-targeted marketing is one of the benefits of the digital age!
PinGroupie is a group directory that allows one to find the right Pinterest groups pertaining to their interests. And the best part is it is a completely free tool involving no signups!
With PinGroupie, you can simply enter the necessary keywords and categories and find boards related to them. You can add further filters like inception dates, exclusion of stale groups, and so on.
The returned groups will contain details about their members, repins, collaborators, last updates and more. You can find niche groups with just a few hundred members or larger groups with millions of active people. With its large filter category, PinGroupie makes sorting through boards a piece of cake.
You can anything from the time the last post was uploaded to a number of likes to the language used as filtering stats.
4. IFTTT
IFTTT is an acronym for “If this, then that”. That sounds like a weird name for a tool to have so what exactly does it do? IFTTT essentially allows you to create custom boolean triggers.
In other words, you can set up future actions based on a particular trigger. For example, you can set up a trigger like – If my Pinterest post receives a re-pin, then post this second pin on this board. Or something like – if this pin is posted on Pinterest, post it on Instagram as well.
With IFTTT, you can set up chains of reactions just like that! IFTTT is not exclusive to Pinterest. In fact, it works well with pretty much every type of website and even off the web with things like Alexa and smart homes.
Scheduling and management tools often offer similar actions, however, these can be limited and aimed in one direction only.
Of course, you will need to give IFTTT access to all the accounts where you want automated posting/ sharing, etc to take place. Each of these triggers is known as a “Recipe” or applet and there are many existing recipes available on the internet that you can use with your IFTTT account.
IFTTT has a forever-free plan with which you can try unlimited applets and try only 3 of your own. At 360 INR per month, you can create unlimited applets, add many conditional triggers and get priority support!
5. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is yet another scheduling and management tool for Pinterest. On the whole, the Hootsuite UI is a bit dated, however, it still does what it set out to do.
With Hootsuite, you can manage multiple images, schedule them for uploading, and add them to separate boards. You can search for top trends, get analytics for posted pins and post on other social channels as well.
But Hootsuite’s main selling point is the huge number of integrations it offers. Hootsuite can integrate with Tailwind, ViralTag, Hubspot, Canva Adobe Stock and more. This means you can get the benefits of all the other types of tools right here. Despite Hootsuite not having an editor screen, you can use Canva and Adobe Stock for the same and so on.
Hootsuite also lets one know of any recent comments, which you can reply to from within the Hootsuite dash itself. Their social analytics is extremely strong and details with a new BETA feature called Impact Content being introduced. Hootsuite is a great Pinterest marketing option and especially great for larger businesses working with big teams.
Collaboration and sharing are easy, so it transitions between different tools. Starting from 1260 INR per month, one can manage up to 10 accounts and schedule unlimited posts. You get a 30-day free trial as well!
6. Loop88
Curating and growing an account is hard work. But if you’re still waiting for a good affiliate marketing person or want to be on the receiving end of a sponsor – then maybe you need to do more than send those emails.
Loop88 is something that can help you close this loop with them!
It acts as a channel between Pinterest influencers who are in need of sponsors to brands who are in need of an advertiser. Big brands like Verizon and Home Depot have been known to use Loop88 to connect with the right person.
The influencer paid by the brand will then add the relevant pins to promote their business. They can be tag the stores on it.
However, Loop88 does have a strict inclusion program. This means, to be a part of the system you need to either a well-known influencer or a well-known brand. Loop88 claims that they have a diverse portfolio and their reach includes almost 95% of the Pinterest active profiles.
If you are looking for increased repins and higher exposure, this can be a great place to start building relations.
7. Pinoculars Conversion Tracking
Looking to set up Pinterest conversion tracking tags on your Shopify store?
Pinoculars is the solution!
Pinterest’s system of tracking is much more complex than that of Facebook and can be difficult for someone without coding knowledge to set up. A tracking app essentially tracks user interests and shows them repetitive adverts based on this.
Remarketing often results in conversions because the chances that a user will buy something based on the first ad they see is quite low. This is where Pinoculars comes in.
Pinoculars makes the process of confusing tracking tags extremely easy! With this, you can target people with new ads or even ads of items they have abandoned in their cart.
You can set up a special board for Promoted Pins on Pinterest and then set these up for being displayed using the tracker. Pinoculars is available on the Shopify App Store and as a WordPress plugin for 15 USD, with a 7-day free trial.
8. Socinator
Similar to Tailwind and Buffer, Socinator is a Pinterest marketing tool. However, despite its great features, it is quite underrated and often loses out to tools like Hootsuite in popularity polls.
We’re here to tell you that Socinator absolutely rocks with a 4.3 rating on average on Capterra!
Socinator has a special Pinterest Marketing tool, which allowed the developers to focus on many more essential Pinterest-specific features. You can of course schedule posts, and check out analytics. But with Socinator, you can also set up auto-follow-backs, auto-create boards, auto unfollow, auto-re-pinning and post videos from Youtube onto Pinterest.
Their PinDominator allows you to manage files effectively by creating different folders and subfolders, each of which can be scheduled into an uploading queue anytime. PinDominator can also be used to look at the stats of each folder and export them as CSV files. Socinator also combines PinGroupie’s features to allow you to search for users and boards based on keywords, categories and other filters.
Starting from 9.95 USD per month, Socinator is a great deal that comes with features of two to three other tools. However, even the lowest package comes with its Facebook, Linkedin and other social packages as well – which might be unnecessary for solely Pinterest marketers.
9. Gleam
For ages, free gifts and giveaways have been a great way to attract new customers. The allure of participating to win can turn into good coverage for the company.
Online platforms like Instagram and Pinterest allow giveaways but have certain policies that one must comply with. Apart from this, adapting the campaign to the online manner might also require some amount of expertise.
This is where Gleam comes in. Gleam is a campaign planner and runner that allows one to run contests on Pinterest, complete with rewards and analytics.
It comes with a mobile widget that you can use to track users, see all submissions, check if your guidelines are compliant with Pinterest guidelines, create links for viral sharing and more.
Gleam can pick a winner based on set criteria or you can select a winner manually.
Entries can be in the form of single pins or entire boards. Of course, contests should go beyond borders, and Gleam facilities it with their integrations with Shopify, Amazon, Facebook and more. Gleam can also verify users to make sure you reach the right participants and can weed out spambots.
There are four separate packages – Competitions (for setting contests), Rewards (allowing users to unlock rewards), Galleries (curate content), Captures (sent out targetted messages). You can get them individually or get the entire set for 97 USD per month.
10. NinjaPinner
A common strategy when new brands pop in is to find users who might be interested in their products and following them. Brands often end up following huge numbers of people this way, however, without something concrete to track the results of this – there’s not much gravity to the process.
NinjaPinner allows one to do just that.
Pinterest has strong guidelines regarding mass follows and unfollows with the latter getting accounts banned. NinjaPinner allows to mass-follow people by filtering them based on their interests of keywords. This can be scheduled with breaks in between. Similarly, it can be used to schedule un-follows for inactive accounts.
Other automation it offers is auto-pinning, auto-uploading, auto-re-follow, sending invites and auto-downloads. Along with this, NinjaPinner allows proxy support so that you can hide your IP should the need arise. Their account protection ensures you don’t get banned from these activities. Their blacklist creation allows you to block accounts en masse.
Finally, you can manage multiple Pinterest accounts using a single NinjaPinner account! After a 7 day free trial, you can get NinjaPinner for just 28 USD per year. This is one of the cheapest plans available and well worth the pennies!
Conclusion
So you’ve seen tools both free and paid for virtually every possibility. Automation is fast becoming a trend as it takes much of a load of manual tasks. With tools like IFTTT, the flexibility to curate these automated tasks is great.
From scheduling to sending targetted messages, nothing is left to chance anymore. With platforms like Instagram becoming more e-commerce friendly, the same can be expected from Pinterest as well. In fact, they are already offering many things that allow companies to increase their ROI.
Pinterest is a well-established platform with many large brands that have garnered huge followers. standing out amongst them is a task of both endurance and hard work. Tools and data are the absolute strength for anyone looking to break in and with this list, we’re sure you can succeed!
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