We already all know that using Pinterest is the number one marketing strategy to drive traffic to our blogs and Teacher Stores, but let's face it who has time to be on Pinterest all day. I know I don't and I'm sure you feel the same way. Our families, happiness, health and keeping up with our own classrooms are on the tops of our lists. When we find some spare time in our busy schedules we need to first schedule in time to work on product creation and then do some marketing through a variety of social media. Getting all this accomplished is always going to be a challenge, however, I found a few tips and tricks along the way to make life easier.
I have found that by using a Pinterest scheduler, my page views on my blog continue to soar and my Pinterest profile shows a dramatic increase in daily impressions and average daily users. You can view some of these stats if you have a Pinterest business account and click on the analytics. If you are seriously interested in jumpstarting your business so it can catapult into new horizons than you must consider a Pinterest scheduler to get your ideas and products out there. Just posting on other forms of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram just doesn't always do enough. This is especially true with all the recent changes that have taken place in some of these platforms as your posts are not always seen by all of your followers. Pinterest has a new smart feed. The more active you are on Pinterest, the more likely your photos will show up on other feeds.
I am convinced that Tailwind is a small business must have. I do realize that there a few other Pinterest schedulers out there but I just want to share with you how I have found success with this particular one.
Here are twelve ways that I have used some of Tailwind's features to increase traffic to my blog and Teacher Pay Teacher Stores.
1. AMAZING ANALYTICS
Yes, you can view some analytics on your Pinterest Business account but if you want to have access to AMAZING analytics you must check out all the stats that Tailwind has to offer. Here you can view your number of followers week by week and your top performing pins and boards and much more. Each week tailwind will send you an overview of how well you are doing through email.
2. BATCH SCHEDULING
This is a HUGE time saver! Tailwind makes is so simple to batch schedule all your pins by a click of a few buttons. If you are on Google Chrome, Safari or Firefox, you can use Tailwind's browser extension tool to schedule pins from any website including Pinterest. My pinning strategies are quite simple. I simply go to my likes page found on my Pinterest profile to find some of the best ideas I've discovered on Pinterest to go along with some of my products and save a bunch of related pins to my drafts. I also have a special board with products pinned next to related videos, anchor charts and other free hands-on activities that tie in with my products. You can create your own specialty boards for each area you teach and pin from them. Once I have many pins stored in my drafts then I go ahead and schedule my pins. It is most important that you know the collaborative boards rules before you decide to pin. Please adhere to their rules. Most boards do like at least a 3 to 1 ratio of free ideas to paid products.
3. PEAK PERFORMING TIME SLOTS
Do you ever wonder when is the best time to pin? What time of the day will most viewers be looking at your educational products and blog posts? Tailwind takes all the guess work out of it. When you sign up with Tailwind, it will determine what time of the day is best for your specific account by analyzing your pins. I just love this feature! The picture above shows all my scheduled time slots for Mondays in green. The suggested time slots have a plus sign next to them in case I want to add more. If you want to add other suggested time slots into your daily schedule you can or may want to add in your own custom times to pin. It is entirely up to you. You will appreciate all the flexibility tailwind has to offer.
4. UNLIMITED PINNING
If you sign up for the annual plan your pinning is unlimited. If you get the month to month version you are able to pin up to 400 pins per month. There may be other plans out there that might be a little less expensive, however, they do not feature all the analytics and flexibility that is on Tailwind.
Since I have the annual plan I do pin frequently. As you can see by my Monday's schedule I have almost 50-time slots being used.
5. SCHEDULE PINS ON THE GO
Tailwind recently created an app to create, edit and schedule pins on mobile iOS devices. They will soon be working on an app for Android users as well. You can find more information about this by visiting their blog post by clicking here
6. INTERVAL PINNING
You can spread out your pins and set your pins to a variety of boards over the course of a week over even a month. You decide how far apart you would like to set your pins. For example, if I have some timely holiday products that I want to showcase, I may schedule them periodically before the holiday season along with other free ideas and blog posts to go along with it. I can decide on what days of the week or times of the day that I want these products to be seen and on what particular boards I want to showcase them on.
7. SHUFFLE & LOCK Features
There are times in which you will want to shuffle up your scheduled pins to create more of a wider variety and mix of ideas as you pin and there are other times in which you will want some pins scheduled to a specific time frame. These features come in handy when setting up your scheduled pins for the future.
8. BOARD LISTS
If you are like me, you probably have many collaborative boards in a wide range of subjects. Tailwind makes it easy for you to pin certain things to specific boards that fall under the same subject. You can create lists of boards that frequently get used together. For instance, if I want to pin a science activity that I just created to boards that deal with science; I can just pull up my science board list and pin my product to all the science boards. It will be scheduled in my que and put into different time slots to be pinned to all my science boards on my list. For boards that have a lot of specific rules and you don't want to be booted off, I would suggest not adding them to board lists and pin separately to these boards using the specific time feature with lots of ideas surrounding your paid product.
9. PIN INSPECTOR
If you want to know which pins are performing well you can go to your pin inspector. It will tell you the number of times your repins, likes and comments within a certain time frame. By analyzing this I can see my Phases of the Moon Science Products received many repins and this turned into many sales for me this week. My blog post for Kindness Week received lots of traffic and I am thrilled to send my important message across on how to inspire more kindness in our classrooms and communities.
10. BOARD INSIGHTS
On the Board Insights feature you can see which of your boards are doing well and which ones are not receiving a lot of traffic. Analyze this information and be sure to pin to boards that are getting the most traffic and try to improve, delete or avoid those that are not getting much attention.
11. TRIBES
Tailwind has a new feature called tribes. This is a great way to collaborate with your teacher friends as you share ideas. Tribes are groups in which you can add your friends or other contributors too. You add your content to the tribe and others can add theirs as well. All contributors can share each other's content. This is an easy way to increase repins. It can also make scheduling easier since you will have a great selection of pins readily available from trusted people you know. It is a win, win for everyone involved!
If you are already on Tailwind or want to join in, I also have a tribe that you may want to join in on.
It is called Kindergarten & First Grade Fun
Check it out by clicking hereTribes is currently Free for anyone to use
(even if they aren't using Tailwind already!)
Anyone who I invite who's new to Tailwind will get a free month of Tailwind Plus- Just use the referral code
http://twapp.it/i/123kteach?
12. FREE TRIAL
If you think you want to give Tailwind a try you can start a FREE trial. Anyone who I invite who's new to Tailwind will get a free month of Tailwind. Just use the referral code below. If you do decide you like it and use this code, you will get a $ 30.00 credit
https://www.tailwindapp.com/i/123kteach
http://twapp.it/i/123kteach?
Do you have a marketing strategy that works for you? If you use tailwind, what tips and tricks can you share with us? Please share in the comment section below.