Feeling lost without BoardBooster? Here’s how to Succeed on Pinterest with Tailwind

The shutdown of BoardBooster came as a shock to some Pinterest marketers, many of whom are now struggling to find a new Pinterest scheduler or to find the time to keep up with manual Pinning.

As you make this transition, it’s best to work with Pinterest-approved marketing partners, such as Tailwind. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the biggest is that partner tools are designed to help content creators like you make the most of Pinterest in a healthy way that works for the long term.

One of the things we have heard over and over again from BoardBooster users is that they want a fast, easy way to set up their Pinterest schedules for sustained and consistent activity on Pinterest. We can help with that!

To help BoardBooster users transition to Tailwind, we thought it might be helpful to show how some of the more popular functionality in BoardBooster translates to using Tailwind. In doing so, we worked with Pinterest to ensure the recommended processes  below reflect current best practices for healthy, sustainable Pinning.

In particular, we’ll cover how you can move forward without these six features you might have used in BoardBooster:

• Automatically sourcing Pins from other Pinners’ Boards
• Easy sharing and community distribution of new content
• A set-it-and-forget-it approach to resharing content
• Deleting duplicate Pins
• Automated Pinning to Group Boards
• Monitoring Pin links with Pin Doctor

How to Use Tailwind to Curate Content for Your Boards

Why Curate Content: Pinterest favors “Active Creators” who create content on a weekly or daily basis. If you’re not creating new Pins for your own content daily, you’ll want to stay active by curating other people’s content. Staying active and Pinning daily doesn’t necessarily mean you need to Pin 100 times a day, either.

Rather than aiming for an arbitrary number of Pins per day, curate the best content and create a great experience for your followers by focusing on the quality of content, images, and descriptions that you choose to Pin. If this means you now Pin 10 times a day instead of 50, that’s OK! One key to Pinterest success? Focus on quality of content, images, and the descriptions you Pin. If that means you save 10 Pins a day instead of 50, that's OK! Click to Tweet Your followers (and Pinterest) will appreciate your commitment to quality.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there is no requirement to Pin to every Board every day. After all, Pinning to your “Easter” board in May probably doesn’t make a lot of sense – just pick it up again next year. And remember, Pinning your own new content is priority number one, so if this frees you up to spend more time blogging – great!

What You Did in BoardBooster: Automatically sourcing Pins by using other people’s Boards as your source – essentially duplicating other Pinner’s Boards, using automated BoardBooster Tribes and Pinning your own secret Boards to keep your account Pinning consistently. You won’t find these exact features in Tailwind, as they violate Pinterest’s Terms of Use.

What To Do Instead: Create a unique resource on Pinterest by finding and ensuring the quality of content that is of interest to your followers. Join Tailwind Tribes, where groups of creators share high-quality content every day – reducing the time it takes you to find great Pins to share. Tailwind Tribes give members the freedom to share only content that is relevant for their followers.

Pin naturally, with your audience’s best interests in mind, and with regards to seasonality. Curating high-quality content takes time, so remember that you do NOT need to Pin to every Board every day or Pin 100 times a day to be considered active. Pinning is much more manageable (and effective) when you concentrate on creating or curating a handful of high-quality Pins each day.

How Tailwind Helps:

• Tailwind’s browser extension allows you to Pin quickly and on the go. Find a great article while catching up on your morning reading? Click the button, choose an image, spruce up the description and GO! Every Pin scheduled from Tailwind (even if you schedule it right from Pinterest) is a Fresh Pin, not a repin – and that’s a good thing!
  If you’d like to collect Pins in a secret Board for scheduling later, you can! Just visit your secret Board on Pinterest and use the Tailwind browser extension to schedule Pins.
• Tailwind’s Pin Inspector lets you discover which of your content resonates best for your audience on each Board so you can better curate for them
• Join Tailwind Tribes. Tailwind Tribes are groups of like-minded content creators who collaborate around content niches of mutual interest. The most successful Tribes are those with a specific focus, with owners who maintain quality control, and Tribemates who are committed to real collaboration. Your favorite Tribe will be an always-updated library of trusted content, optimized for Pinterest sharing! Find a Tribe that’s right for you.

Sharing Your New Content to Your Pinterest Boards

Why and how: Pinterest prioritizes Pins from the content creator! Share your new content to your most relevant board first. As the content spreads across Pinterest, it will carry metadata from that Board with it to help the Pin appear in the most relevant searches. So, if you’ve published a new product listing for a pair of “gold hoop earrings,” you’ll Pin it to your “Hoop Earrings” or “Gold Earrings” board before sharing it to your more general (but still relevant) “Jewelry” Board.

Pinterest wants YOU(r fresh content)! Pin your new content to the most relevant Board for the best search placement. Click to Tweet

You can still share your content to all your other relevant Boards afterwards. But remember that sharing your content to irrelevant Boards will not help you spread your content. In fact, when you share your content to a board unrelated to that content, it confuses the signals, making it difficult for Pinterest to serve up your Pin in the searches most likely to generate clicks and saves. Did you share those “gold hoop earrings” to your “sneakers” Board? Pinterest is likely able to tell they’re NOT sneakers – but you’re not helping it figure out what they ARE.

Always freshly Pin your own content.  In the past, Pinners theorized that finding their previously saved Pin on Pinterest and directly saving their own content would help their overall engagement score and improve the visibility of their Pin. This is not the case. Pinterest knows you are the content creator, so put your Pins in your relevant Boards and let your audience do the saving.

What You Did in BoardBooster: Adding your content to a secret Board, a Campaign, or to a Loop which shared Pins to your Boards. Adding content to a BoardBooster tribe where all members must share your Pin.

What To Do Instead: Schedule your content to only relevant Boards and start with the most relevant first.  Also, add it to Tailwind Tribes where your Tribemates can choose to share or not. It’s in your best interests to give Tribemates that option – after all, if their audience engages with it, it’ll be spread more widely on Pinterest.

How Tailwind Helps:

• Board lists and Interval Pinning. Pinning the same content several times in quick succession makes for a poor experience for your followers  – who may become annoyed and unfollow you!Then again, who can remember to go back and space out Pins at reasonable intervals each time you publish a new post or add a new product? Pin your first Pin to your most relevant board manually, and then schedule it out to all relevant boards using time-saving Board lists and interval Pinning.

• Join Tailwind Tribes. Tailwind Tribes are great for finding quality content to curate an engaging Pinterest account, but they’re also useful for getting your Pins in front of a new audience. Find a Tribe.

Resharing Your Content on Pinterest

Resharing your high-performing content sparingly to the most relevant Boards can help you reach your new followers and help your content appear in the home feed and search results on Pinterest. But, do so with intention!

Continually resharing low-performing content is not only a good way to get yourself unfollowed as your followers get tired of seeing the same Pins over and over, it will also eventually hurt your account’s ranking on Pinterest and impact the reach of all of your content in the future. Ouch.

If your Pin doesn’t work well on your Boards, consider giving it a new lease on life by changing the image and the description to more closely align with the Board titles and descriptions before you reshare it.

Did your Pin fall flat the first time out? Give it a new image, a new description, and some hashtags to give your content another shot at Pinterest success! Click to Tweet

When you find evergreen content that performs well on a given Board or Boards, reshare it sparingly to those boards up to several times a year, ideally spending the time to use different images and descriptions to optimize your messaging and increase your opportunity for appearing in relevant search results.

If you create seasonal content, you’ll want to reshare that content when your followers are looking for it. Pinners tend to plan early, so reshare about two months before the holiday or event.

What You Did in BoardBooster: A set-it-and-forget it schedule which requires no maintenance or optimization.

What To Do Instead: We know set-it-and-forget-it sounds so appealing, but it’s not a viable strategy for long-term success. All Pins age eventually, and continually resharing content that’s no longer performing will drag down the engagement on all of your Pins, hurting your business in the long run. Healthy Pinning habits take a little time. Still, many Tailwind members do this effectively in just 1-2 hours per week. Resharing thoughtfully by reviewing how your Pins are performing allows you to try variations in images, descriptions, and even hashtags – which can all get your Pin much further on Pinterest.

How Tailwind Helps:

• Pin Inspector displays the activity on your Pins and allows you to easily spot which Pins have received engagement (see below). Sorting by fewest Repins (Saves) can help you identify Pins you might want to rework before resharing.  Sorting by specific Boards will help you identify the Pins that have performed well there.

• Add it to SmartLoop (beta). Once you’ve identified a few pieces of content which have performed well on your Boards, add them to a Loop to periodically reshare those hand-picked Pins to relevant Boards.

Deleting Duplicate Pins

For many Pinterest marketers, deleting underperforming Pins was viewed as a way to increase overall Pin engagement, with the goal of increasing the prominence of Pins in search and the Smartfeed. For many BoardBooster users, it also served to help cut back on the many instances of the same Pin in the same Board, which would otherwise accrue over time. For others, the belief that people browse your Boards and would be put off by duplicates seemed to build a case for the practice.

Can we just all agree to stop deleting Pins? Here’s why:

1. Deleting underperforming Pins is a waste of time because:
   1. Sometimes it takes a while for a Pin to gain exposure and engagement. In fact, we have seen Pins languish for weeks or months, only to take off later – and continue to deliver traffic for years. Delete it too fast, and you missed your chance!
   2. A Pin with low engagement will not hurt the exposure of your other Pins. Each stands on its own in search (one caveat – repeatedly saving low-performing Pins that don’t resonate with your audience will hurt your account over time).
2. If you are intentionally resharing a Pin to the same Board after a reasonable period of time, there is no spammy strategy, and no need to delete to keep your Boards looking good.
3. Pinterest is not like Google where many feel that “duplicate content” may be penalized in some way. In fact 80% of the content on Pinterest is Repins.
4. The vast majority of Pinterest activity takes place in search.  People are not likely to browse your boards regularly, and should they do so and notice that you have a duplicate or two, this shouldn’t be a problem.

What You Did in BoardBooster: Duplicate Pins to the same Boards were deleted automatically so that you can continue to Loop Pins without making your Boards appear spammy or automated, even though they were.

What To Do Instead: Remember that the engagement (or lack thereof) of your followers with your Pins is integral to the success of your Pins. So, make it a practice to reshare content if and when it is likely to be engaging to your audience, spacing out reshares in a way that feels natural. Rather than spending hours deleting Pins to mask spammy practices, spend your valuable marketing time creating new content (blog posts, products, new images, new descriptions) instead.

Stop deleting underperforming Pins on Pinterest. Do this instead! Click to Tweet

How Tailwind Can Help

• Use Pin Inspector to learn about what works on your Boards (and what doesn’t). Use what you learn to help you create better Pins or consider editing Board titles and descriptions to better align with the content you share there. Looking at insights on the Pins you curate from other people’s content can even help you figure out what to write AND Pin about. When you Pin with intention, there is no need to delete Pins.
• SmartLoop helps you remember to reshare your best evergreen and seasonal content from time to time and shows you how your Pins are performing so you can optimize what you reshare and when.

Using Group Boards to Amplify Content

Pinterest Group Boards were created with the goal of helping people collaborate on Pinterest. Planning a trip with a friend? Create a Group Board you can both add to and then give feedback when you comment on the Pins. Putting together an event? Invite the speakers or other planners to add and comment on ideas in the Board.

Over time though, Pinning to Group Boards became a strategy many used to get their content in front of the followers of those Group Boards, thus expanding the reach of their content.

Pinterest would like Pinners to get back to the original purpose of Group Boards – genuine collaboration. Assuming that only the contributors of Group Boards would be most likely to find the content therein engaging, the algorithm is beginning to give Pins saved to Group Boards less preference in the Smartfeed and in search results.

That said, if you have some that work well for you, keep using them. As always, implementing Pinterest marketing best practices as well as testing and analyzing your own activity will ultimately create the best experience for your audience on Pinterest.

Analyze the performance of your Pinterest Group Boards with Tailwind's Board Insights. Click to Tweet

What You Did in BoardBooster: Automating your Pinning to Group Boards without monitoring which are actually valuable.

What To Do Instead: Be aware of which Group Boards are working for your content overall and don’t feel obligated to continue using Group Boards which are not providing value. Use Group Boards mainly for collaboration. For content amplification, create new Pins, add Pins with new descriptions, use Tailwind Tribes and boost your Pins with Promoted Pins.

How Tailwind Can Help

• Use Board Insights and sort by “Engagement” to see the overall engagement level of your Group Boards. Then, click on the Board name to see Pin Inspector for your Pins on that Board – make sure that the engagement happening on that Board is benefitting you with the Pins you share and not just the Board as a whole. If it’s not working for you, you can leave or archive the Board and focus your efforts elsewhere.

• Use SmartLoop (beta) to reshare relevant content to high-performing Group Boards at sensible intervals.
• Use Tailwind Tribes where groups of like-minded content creators share their content and save yours to Pinterest when they believe it will be engaging to their audience.

Checking Pin Links

Nobody likes a broken link on Pinterest. It’s not a great experience for Pinners and Pinterest is working to weed these out of the Smartfeed.

What You Did in BoardBooster: Using Pin Doctor to identify Pins with missing links, broken links, leading to suspicious websites, etc.

What To Do Instead: Make sure when you’re scheduling Pins that they have good links and lead to reputable sites. Don’t worry too much about Pin links breaking later – Pinterest will naturally start to filter out those Pins with broken links. For your own content, though, DO make sure your links remain active. Use redirects when needed to make sure none of the Pins to your own content lead to a 404 page.

How Tailwind Can Help

• Use Tailwind Tribes to find great content with good links to reputable sites.

In Conclusion:

Here at Tailwind, we’re committed to helping content creators develop and maintain healthy Pinning habits which lead to sustainable marketing results over time, without blind automation. We are also committed to saving time for our members with features such as Tribes, Interval Pinning, Board Lists, and coming soon – SmartLoop. Start using Tailwind today – no credit card required.