WHAT IS THE BEST PINTEREST SCHEDULER FOR BLOGGERS?
In case we’ve never met before, or perhaps you are just new around these parts, you might not know that one of my favourite things ever (next to a nice glass of Pinot) is discovering awesome tools I can use to make my life easier, and my blog and business better (and if these can go hand in hand then that’s the jackpot!)
Just ask any of my poor girlfriends, who have to pretend to be interested while I rabbit on about this amazing new plugin, or software I’ve just discovered (usually for far longer than is rational).
And if you can get me away from Theme Forrest for long enough, then my next favourite thing is Pinterest!
Like a lot of you reading this, so, so many hours of my life have been spent down the Pinterest rabbit hole. Which is all well and good (especially when there’s nothing new on Netflix!). But spending hours and hours Pinning and re-Pinning is definitely not the best use of anyone’s time. No really, it’s not.
I don’t know about you, but if my tombstone says “Here lies Kate, she pinned a lot!”, I’ll be kinda pissed!
So, to not spend every waking hour on Pinterest you need a Pinterest scheduler or Pinterest scheduling tool.
And there are quite a few out there now, each with their own pro’s and cons.
And yes, I have tried pretty much all of them.
So, I thought I’d go let them smash it out Gladiator style, so you can decide which Pinterest scheduler is going to be the hero you choose to save you… and all your precious spare time too!
Let the battle commence!
WHICH IS THE BEST PINTEREST SCHEDULER?
Best Pinterest Scheduler Contestant 1 – Ahalogy (FREE)
Ahalogy is not your standard Pin Scheduler. In fact what they really are is a Pinterest content aggregator, and they then sell that content (which is basically anything you Pin from your site via their tool) to brands to then re-pin on their own Pinterest accounts and boards.
So in return for you being able to use their tool for free (which does have it’s upsides), you are basically allowing them to make money off promoting your content for you. This does of course also have the bonus of your content possibly also being shared by some big brands. So it can be a win, win. Although the rest of the Ahalogy functionality is a little lacking for the things that really count.
Access is via application only, you can get more info and apply for Ahalogy here.
Things I love:
1 – Weekly emails from the team highlighting what’s trending right now.
2 – Awesome “follow me on Pinterest” slider.
3 – Gorgeous and easy to use design.
4 – It’s free for bloggers.
5 – You could get extra exposure when your content gets pinned by others through their system.
What’s not so great:
1 – No bulk scheduling (and that is really necessary if you ask me!)
Use it for: Growing your reach by sharing your own content with brands.
Best Pinterest Scheduler Contestant 2 – Viral Tag (from $24 a month)
Viral Tag was actually the first Pinterest scheduler around, and so it will always have a special place in my heart. It is also the first (and as far as I know only) Pinterest scheduler to also let you schedule to Instagram. Which is quite the game changer if your blog is very visual-based.
It’s pretty easy to use, and lets you very easily re-pin and pin in bulk. You just select the images, update the captions and URLs if needed (the fact you can bulk update the captions is the thing I love about it most), and then set how far apart you’d like them scheduled.
Things I Love:
– You can bulk update descriptions and links – this is really useful, especially with the new Smartfeed as pics without good key-word rich descriptions will rarely even get seen at all.
– You can also schedule to Instagram and every other Social Media platform – enough said!
Best Pinterest Scheduler Contestant 3 – Board Booster ($10 – $30 per month)
This one I had heard a few people rave about, but it was just so ugly (it’s pink and looks like it was designed by a uni student in the ’90s!) I just assumed it would be really buggy and didn’t bother with it. BUT after hearing the lovely Melyssa from The Nectar Collective rave about it a little while ago, I knew it must be good, so I jumped in and tested it. And yep. Even though it’s hella ugly, it’s also hella-smart. And has a couple of very cool functions the others don’t.
The most impressive one being a thing called “looping”. Which is really handy if you’ve already been pinning for a while, and so already have quite a few pins on your boards. What looping does is automatically (on a schedule you set) re-pin existing pins from your boards, so taking old pins and looping them to the top. It also can be set to delete the old pin (or which ever gets pinned more!), so you don’t end up with lots of duplicates.
The second awesome feature is something called Board Doctor. This tool will scan your pins for any with broken links, or a low number of repins and lets you bulk move them to another board (for $0.01 per pin). This is great for keeping your boards clean and up to date, and to stop you getting penalised by the Pinterest Smartfeed algorithm too (if you’d like to know more about the Smartfeed alogorithm check out my course Pinterest 4 Bloggers for all the details!)
Things I love:
– Pin looping… this is life changing!
– Board Dr
What’s no so great
– The way the actual Pin scheduling works is a bit clunky and confusing and leaves you with a bunch of secret boards which just makes things a bit messy. I much prefer Viraltag or Tailwind for this.
Best Pinterest Scheduler Contestant 4 – Tailwind
Lucky last in the “Best Pinterest Scheduler Smackdown” is Tailwind. I didn’t used to like Tailwind very much, as when it first launched it was super buggy, and they had quite restrictive re-pinning limits. However over the last 12-months they’ve pulled out all the stops, and now their platform is definitely one of the best. At least as far as appearance, ease of use, analytics and yes also price (it’s $10 a month for unlimited pinning when you buy an annual pass).
Things I love:
– Shuffle – As I like to do about a months pinning at once, it’s very handy to be able to bulk upload things in batches, and then “shuffle” my schedule so it looks more natural.
– Official partner with Pinterest – I actually just found this out, but as I know a lot of people worry about
The winner & what do I actually use?
Turns out this is one of those “everybody gets a prize” type of contests. Because to be honest, we actually use most of these tools together.
– We use Ahalogy for their awesome “sign up” slider and also to share our best blog posts each week.
– We use Boardbooster to periodically clean up our boards, and also to do daily “looping” (this means we can share about 80-100 pins a day all on autopilot!)
– We use Tailwind (although Viraltag does the same thing, it’s just more expensive) to share & re-share our blog content, as well as any extra “timely” re-pins (for seasonal things like Easter, Christmas etc..)
This costs about $40US a month (although you could do it for less if you wanted less “looped” pins), and means we can do an epic amount of pinning in under an hour a week which is not too shabby at all.
