Using Pinterest can be an effective strategy for food bloggers to generate traffic, but all that pinning can be time consuming! In our series, Mastering Tailwind for Pinterest, Chrissie Baker shares her strategies and tips on using Tailwind to help you automate your food blog’s pinning strategy. In earlier posts, Chrissie focused on using Tailwind's features, but today she helps you understand its limitations. Being aware of them is also important to using Tailwind to support your Pinterest strategy and grow your blog.
Editor's Note: FBC is an affiliate for Tailwind and a Tailwind customer (because we love their service).
Now that you’ve learned how to schedule pins with Tailwind, manage your schedule and board lists, and use Tailwind Analytics to help grow the traffic to your blog from Pinterest, it’s time take a step back and talk about the limitations of Tailwind, especially when it comes to good Pinterest practices.
Every food blogger uses Pinterest differently and no two bloggers’ Pinterest strategies are exactly alike. While there are some “best practices” when it comes to Pinterest that are fairly widely known, the Pinterest algorithm remains mostly a mystery to users. This is one of the reasons bloggers are often drawn to scheduling tools like Tailwind.
One of the best things about Tailwind is its flexibility; it allows bloggers to utilize the scheduling tool as precisely as they wish, tailoring their pinning schedules to what works best for their individual blogs and monitoring their progress toward any Pinterest-related goals with the analytics tools.
Tailwind’s Limitations
But as dynamic as Tailwind is, it has its limitations. It’s not a one-size-fits-all guaranteed way to grow your blog using Pinterest — it’s simply a tool to help bloggers apply their Pinterest strategy while saving valuable time and energy. There are a few critical things bloggers should remember when using Tailwind to help grow their blogs.
Tailwind Doesn’t Recognize or Apply Pinterest Board Rules
If you’re fortunate enough to be a member of several Pinterest group boards, you’ll know how difficult it is to keep track of each board and its associated rules. As I mentioned previously in this Tailwind series, the interval scheduling feature is a good way to avoid over-pinning to group boards and almost guarantees that a user won’t break Pinterest board rules.
Almost. But not completely.
Tailwind communicates with your Pinterest account to pull your Pinterest boards into board lists, but there’s no way to record any information about each of your Pinterest boards, like number of followers, level of performance, or group board rules. Since Tailwind doesn’t have the capacity to track any information about Pinterest boards other than their names, this can create confusion when scheduling pins.
There’s always a chance that a user may go over the daily pinning limit on a specific board, even when using the interval feature. Sometimes this isn’t a big deal, but on many extremely high-performing group boards, the rules are very strict and you probably don’t want to risk being removed from them for any reason.
Unfortunately, many Tailwind users still pin manually to high-performing group boards with strict rules, just to avoid any scheduling mistakes.
Tailwind Doesn’t Allow for Board-Specific Batch Pinning
Tailwind’s inability to track any information about Pinterest boards other than their names creates more than just a few problems. In addition to the issue of over-pinning to high-performing boards, the fact that Tailwind doesn’t evaluate Pinterest boards in any way means it’s also impossible to schedule multiple pins to the same board with ease, making scheduling pins for only one specific board an incredibly tedious task.
Let’s say you have a very high performing Pinterest board with very strict rules. It’s not a board you can afford to get kicked out of and you can only pin two pins per day to it. Playing it safe with the interval feature may seem like a good idea, but it isn’t actually the best option to maximize your pinning to that board. In order to make the most of that high-performing board, you’ll want to add exactly two pins per day to it, every single day.
Using Tailwind to schedule pins to this board with these specific parameters might actually be more tedious than simply pinning to it manually every day, because there’s no interval feature that can be applied to a Pinterest board, only one that can be applied to a Pinterest pin being pinned on many boards.
One major improvement Tailwind should consider is to provide a way to schedule multiple pins from one board to another (group) board on a specific frequency that complies with a specific group board’s rules. If a Tailwind user were able to specify information about Pinterest boards (instead of just being able to organize the boards into lists) that could affect how pins are scheduled to those boards, it would be a complete game-changer for Tailwind users looking to maximize their high-performing boards.
Tailwind Is Not a Personal Pinterest Assistant
Pardon the obviousness of that statement, but it’s important to remember that when you’re a Tailwind user, you’re using software that’s simply a scheduler — it’s HOW you use it that will make all the difference.
As “smart” as many of Tailwind’s features are, they don’t even compare to a solid Pinterest strategy developed from personal research and experience with Pinterest. While Tailwind is a dynamic app, it’s simply software that pins on a schedule so you don’t have to sit at your computer all day pinning your content for your followers to see. It requires that you manually schedule your pins and it doesn’t pin anything you don’t specifically tell it to.
This means that as a Tailwind user you’re going to need to stay organized and keep track of all the pins you schedule on intervals or add to your queue, and when the life of a pin you’ve scheduled has ended. This will likely mean spreadsheets that require regular updates and lots of organization, especially if you’ve got a rather large collection of original pins from your blog.
Without additional means of organizing your Pinterest pins and boards, it’s very possible to use Tailwind in a way that can actually harm your brand: by over-pinning, under-pinning, or just plain pinning without a strategy.
And even though Tailwind offers a great analytics tool, it’s important to remember that any data Tailwind collects from your Pinterest profile has very little bearing on how Tailwind works for you. Other than suggesting times in your Smart Schedule, Tailwind’s analytics are simply information for the user and don’t actually impact how the software works for you. This is why staying up-to-date on the latest Pinterest trends and changes to the Pinterest algorithms is critical for bloggers who want to make the most of their Tailwind subscription.
The more you know about Pinterest and how to use it, the more effectively you’ll be able to make Tailwind work for you and your brand.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this Tailwind series and that it helps you use Tailwind for Pinterest as effectively as possible to grow your blog!
More Reading
- Mastering Tailwind for Pinterest: Using Tailwind Analytics
- Mastering Tailwind: Making the Most of Your Tailwind Schedule
- Getting Started with Tailwind for Pinterest
Mastering Tailwind for Pinterest: The Limitations of Tailwind was written by Chrissie Baker. Juggling making healthy meals for her family, baking her heart out and publishing her blog, The Busy Baker, means Chrissie needs to run her social media as efficiently as possible! You can find Chrissie on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
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Thx for the article. I found on the days that i live pin, I’ll see more activity and follows. Im not sure if Tailwind is actually doing me any good. It schedules according to plan but I’m curious if it is producing the same visibility as a live pin would. There is no significant increase to my account that i wasn’t already getting with live pinning. I purchased a one year plan but I’d be hesitant to renew.