In this guest post, Austin Iuliano of dscience.co outlines his favorite strategies for using Tailwind to reach explosive growth on Pinterest. Keep reading to learn his secrets to success!
For those who don’t know, Tailwind is the best Pinterest analytics and scheduling tool on the market. Their affordable Plus plan (starting at $9.99 a month for an annual account) lets you schedule an unlimited number of pins every month. What a time saver! Scheduling pins will only take a couple of hours, and then you are done for the month.
How to use Tailwind to explode your Pinterest account strategy.
Before we can use Tailwind to it’s fullest, we need to lay out a solid Pinterest strategy. This is the stuff that has been shared time and again. It still holds true.
#1 Pin high-quality content
#2 Pin on a regular basis
#3 Create boards with amazing keyword-rich descriptions
#4 Share your Pinterest account on other social medias
#5 Connect with other Pinterest users
#6 Follow and engage other users
#7 Create Pin-worthy content
#8 Enable rich pins
Yep, you need to do all of the above. But, to increase your Pinterest game, you must do a few more things that I’ll explain below. If you need a quick checklist to run through. Check out this handy dandy article.
Understanding Pinterest Algorithms
Pinterest is a massive business that is building a visual search engine to rival Google. My prediction is that within the next 18-24 months, Pinterest will take a decent chunk out of Google’s visual search and by proxy—their revenue. With 100 million users, Pinterest isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Think about it this way: Pinterest (as a company) wants its users to spend more time on Pinterest: searching, pinning, and sharing. The more time they spend on Pinterest, the more money Pinterest makes through advertising and brand awareness. Their goal is to to make the best experience for the user. That means if you also think “How will the user have the best experience?” you’ll be rewarded.
Pinterest uses their Smart Feed algorithms to help rank pins and provide you with the best experience possible.
There are three main things Pinterest looks at that we can work on improving. They include your account as a whole, the individual boards, and the pin’s themselves. Using the Smart Feed, Pinterest views your account and determines how to show your content. Depending on these factors, Pinterest will show your content to more (or fewer) people. Pinterest also ranks each pin individually. Great or “Pinworthy” content is promoted while crappy content is ignored at best, punished at worst.
How to Increase Your Virality on Pinterest
To start, do some spring cleaning on each of your pins, your boards, and your profile. See if you can move your boards around, update the cover photos, or improve on your descriptions.
Second, sign up for Tailwind, and use their analytics tools. Tailwind should be a key component on building your Pinterest account.
After you have an account, click on “Profile Performance” under the “Track Your Brand” page section. There are two main metrics to be looking at, virility score and engagement score. They look like this:
Remember how I said Pinterest looks at your account as a whole? Well these two numbers are a great representation of your overall Pinterest account’s health. You will want to boost these two numbers as high as possible.
Remember how I said Pinterest looks at a board’s performance? Well Tailwind is awesome and they rank each board’s performance for you.
Under the “Board Insights” section, you can see what boards have the highest level of engagement and virality. These are the boards that are most likely to generate you loads of traffic. Your virality score is based on how many repins per pin are on that board, calculated by the boards (total repins) ÷ (total pins).
If a single board had hundreds of thousands of repins and fewer pins, the board is probably a highly sought after one (hint-hint wink-wink, Pinterest thinks this way too).
A great way to boost a boards ranking is to promote the high performing pins on that board so it receives even more traction.
Next, go to the “Pin Inspector” tab under “Optimize Content”.
This awesome section will show you the pins that are performing the best.
In the Pin Inspector report, Tailwind can organize your pins based on pins with the most engagement – either by Repins, likes or comments. These are your top pins.
Ask yourself these questions after looking at the pin inspector.
- Can these pins be combined together into one board?
- Are these pins your original content?
When I saw my top Pins, I moved relevant pins from one board to combine them all into one board. This created a board with a much higher virality score.
How to Receive More Repins, Clicks, Likes, and Comments
The simple answer to more engagement: pull out your checkbook for Pinterest. I know we all love that social media can be free, but let’s be honest here. Pinterest is a business after all, and will promote you MUCH more with a small amount backing each pin.
Imagine, you have two clients: one that pays you well and another one that asks for everything for free all the time. Who would you promote and support? Simply put, most business people would give attention to the client that pays well.
Triple Your Website Traffic with Pinterest
A friend of mine recommended that I jump on Pinterest advertising. I was skeptical at first because it’s a new platform and I hadn’t heard TONS of positive testimonials.
I took the leap and tried it out. I tested a few of our pins with “Pinterest promoted pins.” I only started with $50 bucks. I figured this amount would be high enough to see results, but low enough to not break the bank.
The $50 in promoted pins bought me 122 unique clicks to my website and 40% of those clicks converted to an offer to join my email list. The clicks averaged out to cost $.47 and $.97 per lead. Not too shabby!
The awesome price per click and leads weren’t even the best part. I jumped for joy after I saw this…
I also received 97 repins THAT DIDN’T COST ME A PENNY. Yep, Pinterest didn’t charge me for the repins. They only billed me for the people who clicked on my promoted pin.
Every repin is another link back to your site that can drive traffic. This is exciting because you’ll see repins in two months that resulted in your initial advertising boost. It’s the gift that keeps on giving pinning.
My suggestion is to take all your original content and promote it for more repins, likes, and comments. This will not only send your virality scores through the stratosphere, but it will also get you a nice bump in referral traffic.
I have been doing this on one of my boards—the board with my original blog post content and the results are amazing. I am receiving an ever increasing amount of followers and traffic.
The benefit of the pinning-cycle is it has a complete snowball effect. Once the pins have some backing engagement, interest and traffic, they go even farther. And you don’t have to do any more “work.”
Now that’s my kind of platform!
In Summary…
To Use Tailwind to explode your Pinterest account you must do the following:
- Pin content, share content, and engage.
- Perform housekeeping on your Pinterest account.
- Track your virality and engagement scores for your boards with Tailwindapp.
- Advertise your board and pins to give your original content the boost it deserves.
With these simple tactics, you will give your traffic and engagement a much-needed boost!
After you are done following this advice, share your results in the comments. How much did your virality scores increase?
