There is always so much to do running an online business – posts, pages, video classes, setting up courses, keeping track of the backend with plugins and updates, subscribers and theme issues. I find it tremendously difficult to get any reasonable social media presence. There are just not enough hours in the day to do everything.
What is the best social media social scheduler? I checked out so many before deciding which would work for me, and I could understand. So when I came across Tailwind, I was suitably impressed with what it offered me. What I don’t want is to have the issue of having to take time out of my day, every day to post to the various social media platforms. So a platform that I can post to Pinterest, Facebook ,Twitter and Instagram all from the same place is perfect along with the fact I can schedule posts several weeks ahead of time. They will be pinned on time! It’s easy to upload images and share from any webpage.
If you want to know more about PINTEREST, ready my article
If we are going to be serious about our business, after all thats why I’m writing articles and you are reading them, the two most important social media platforms to crack today to build a stellar online presence, as I see it, are Pinterest and Instagram.
Istagram has been growing rapidly over the last 4-5 years and drives a huge amount of engagement. While Pinterest is the second highest referrer for social media traffic, Facebook does have a greater user base but the audience is much less likely to purchase than those on Pinterest.
Pinterest and Instagram can build you an organic presence and drive traffic and sales to your website without the need for ads. But for this to happen you need to be posting frequently to both.
You need to be posting around 15-20 pins a day to Pinterest and Instagram around 7 posts a week, so one a day.
The ONLY way to achieve this is with a scheduler…
But What Will Tailwind Do For You?
Tailwind’s Pinterest and Instagram marketing tool does all this:
- Schedules your posts.
- Posts at the best times for you for your engagement.
- Has a tool that repeats your content at an interval you choose.
- Discovers related content you can share to add to your pin schedule.
- Connects you with other pinners with similar businesses, to share content in Tribes.
- Monitors your pins, and offers analytics on them.
- Amplifies your reach, by repinners.
I wil go in to much more detail on each feature below, so you have a full, all round review on Tailwind.
So Lets Look At Tailwind in Detail..
First things first…
So what is this going to cost you?
No point in going further if you feel this is going to be too expensive for you. You do have a free trial first but I always think, there is no point in trying something and then liking it if I know that I won’t be able to afford it or want to pay for it. But like everything these days, the shiny toys that really do make a difference to a business generally cost something.
Subscription Details….
Free Trial
- First 100 pins on Pinterest.
- First 30 posts to Instagram.
- No time limit.
- No credit card details taken on sign up.
Once the free trial is over….
- Monthly at $14.99 for Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter,
- Monthly at $14.99 for Instagram.
OR
- Yearly fee of $119 for Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter
- Yearly fee of $119 for Instagram.
OK…. so that’s the bad news, now let’s look at what TAILWIND can do for you !
SIGN UP……
Go through SIGN UP, either choosing to sign up using your pinterest or instagram accounts.
It will automatically put you onto the free trial.
Follow the online instructions to complete the set up of your free Tailwind account.
Tailwind will then take you through a step by step quick guide on the basics. But I’ll show you all that here..
OK, so the first thing is to get used to the DASHBOARD. This is the main frame for all your actions in Tailwind. This overview shows where everything is and I will elaborate on each feature below.
DASHBOARD
Create Your Pin
Check up the tips on creating a great pin in my article about Pinterest, just like this one here…. By creating the perfect pin template, following the tips in the article, you are already a huge step forward than those that dont follow any scheduling pattern. It allows you to create them at a faster rate i you use a tried and tested template. Only the image and heading to change.
How To Set Up Your Pin
The first thing to do to start setting your pins in Pinterest is to go to draft tab and click ‘create a new pin’ on the right. It gives you a drop down menu where you choose upload a photo/video. This is where you will upload your prepared pin and it will appear in the pin area just like mine has here.
How To Fill In The Pin Details
Once the pin is completed and you have clicked to add it to the queue of pins, it will automatically be added to the next available schedule slot. As you can see the one available below is on Tuesday April 14 at 2.52am.
If you don’t want the pin to be in that slot, you can manually move it by clicking on it and physically moving it to the slot you want. It might be that you want to have a mix of your own pins to your own website with pins from other likeminded entrepreneurs added to the schedule. Pinterest have an algorithm for pinning that ensures freshness and reduces repetition. Tailwind have a cute button, circled above, that reassures your pinning pattern and schedule are within the parameters set by Pinterest.
Its good pinning practice to use pins from other likeminded people, Pinterest encourages this and it shows a good relationship with other entrepreneurs.
Two Or More Boards
If you want to pin to more than one board at a time, thats fine. But one suggestion from Tailwind is that, for best effect, don’t pin at the same time or the same day, but stagger it. This way you get better engagement, so you can do this with the ‘Use Interval’ button that appears as soon as you choose more than one board. Click this and enter the details as to howe long you want the interval to be.
Facebook/Twitter Pin Simultaneously
Pinning to Facebook/Twitter is easy from Tailwind. Click the box next to the social media you want to use. You need to add a caption for both and then when the pin is scheduled to post onto Pinterest, it will also post it to Facebook and Twitter.
TRIBES
Ok, so we aren’t talking about these tribes but tribes of people with a common interest that will help you grow your reach and traffic.
As online business entrepreneurs, we face two key issues when it comes to social marketing and tribes help with this in that they give you a steady stream of quality content to pin and get your posts seen by those that are looking for it.
You are given the opportunity to join various tribes… There is a search box for you to type in a keyword, this will bring up various tribes for you to join.
The tribes pop up with detais on how many are in the tribe, how active they are and the button will say ‘Click To Join’. You can join 5. Once you get to that point if you want more, you have to pay to power up.
Where Is The Add To Tribe Button?
Pinning to your tribe is very easy as there is a button to click when you set your pin.
Adding To A Tribe
The pop up will show you all the tribes you have joined. Choose the one you want to pin your banner. To the right you will see two numbers – the firdt relates to how many times you have pinned to this tribe, and the second how many you can pin in a month. The alert triangle tells me that I have already pinned this banner to this tribe.
Remember that share and share alike is the motto here. You need to be actively taking part in sharing other members pins. Saves you a lot of time as its very easy to find pins to add to your scheduled time. It makes it much easier to get to 25 pins a day with Tribes.
More Features
Finding Content
So as we have said, you can find fresh pins to add to your schedule and your own pins by joining Tribes and sharing their pins and adding yours to the tribes too, but you can also find fresh content to pin under your ‘Drafts’ – when you have no drafts, this space is filled with content that Tailwind thinks you will find interesting to pin. Another great feature making life easier !
Insights - Analytics
The insights for your Tailwind account are found here. They look into engagement for each pin, how often its been pinned, how many followers you have… Ive not long started using it so my stats are not that great but give me a month or two, it will be interesting to revisit.
Smart Loop
The smart loop allows you to choose a cycle of pinning for your most successful pins. This allows you to set a timeframe to automatically repin without you having to do anything.
Conclusion
Growth
Tailwind allows a constant presence without having to pin all day long.
It allows pinning at regular intervals so no spamming.
Tailwind pins at the best times of day for best engagement.
Tailwind tribes are another source of pins to share.
It adds you to tribes who will share your pins.
Tailwind will loop pins so they keep posting automatically.
Tailwind has shown that with the plus programme, engagement is much higher and so enabling you to reach more of your audience.
More Engagement In Terms Of Repins On Plus Plan Than Free Plan.
More Followers On Plus Plan Than Free Plan
More Pins Published On Plus Plan Than Free Plan.
Summary
Whilst there are many other scheduling tools on the internet, and my plan was to check out many of them to give an unbaised review but after I started using Tailwind to offer usability insight, I realised that I would have to change the reviews to a ‘How To’ type article…. I found Tailwind easy to get used to, easy to set the pins, taking maybe an hour to set 60/week. It’s not up to the 25/day that’s recommended by Pinterest but I’ll get there, gettimg into the routine of pinning on a Sunday. Try it for yourself for free…
Click The Banner Below To Try It Out…
Thanks for Reading!
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I used to use Hootsuite. I heard of Tailwind but my company already offered me Hootsuite so I never bother to try. I am no longer with that company, maybe this is the time for me to try lol. Thanks for your review on Tailwind. I have been trying to get i to Pinterest game, it is just so hard for me to get I don’t know why! But you are right Pinterest and Instagram by far are the best on the social media right now. I am going to give The free trial a try and take it from there.
Cheers!
Try Tailwind, and with Tribes, you can pin similar material without having to produce it all yourself. I was sceptical about this, why would I want to pin other competitors pins but I choose ones that dont compete with me. It also means that as I am pinning, I am still getting traffic to my site.
When I first saw the number of posts you need a day and per week for Pinterest and Instagram, my heart almost stopped. I am mostly focussed on Instagram right now and can pretty easily do one post a day with pretty good results. However, that 15-20 pins scares me! TAILWIND definitely sounds like the only way I would be able to manage that and still do quality work for my website. Thanks for the suggestion!
It is a shock! I was too, thinking that it would be impossible but I have started out with around 60 a week and will build from there. I would rather have a continuous presence than random posting. So by using this it might not be up to 25 a day but at least I am getting regularity to it and hopefully increasing my traffic.
I have not used Tailwind but I’ve read many good things about it. Basically it will help me schedule posts for my social media accounts, which is very handy. Although for me personally, manual posting is still the way to go, although having a scheduler wouldn’t hurt, especially if you handle a lot of social media accounts.
Thanks for sharing!
Its definitely the way to go .Ideally you should be posting 25-30 pins a day which for anyone has got to be tough. I can’t do that. So this way I spend an hour or so on a Sunday and its done, I can forget about it until next Sunday.
If one is not careful with social media, it can eat a lot of valuable time but with least productivity. This tool, social media scheduler is the answer for that problem. And I think this is best used with a Facebook fan page rather than with a personal account. The reason I said this is, if friends noticed that your posts are calculated like they’re scheduled, they will start to lose interest much more if they noticed that the content or posts are being repeated at an interval you choose. But with a fan page, most audiences already expect that.
Thats a good observation. I post in Fcebook to my business account so hoping that it will reach those interested in entreprenerial business.
I am very new to social media management and I had never heard about Tailwind before. From your description, it sounds like a very useful tool for improving your Instagram and Pinterest strategies. I like the fact that you can sign up for a free trial before actually deciding whether to use it or not. I’ll give it a try!
The trouble with free trials is that you have to be prepared to pay for it at the end of it, and I have a policy that if Im not prepared to pay for it at the end I wont even try the free version. Ive had stuff in the past that i have tried and loved, but the subs were too steep. This is well priced.
Personally, I use a free WordPress plugin for this but it is good to know that there are other options out there. Tailwind gives you plenty of free time to give it a good try to see if, maybe, it’s even BETTER than the free options! I was just wondering if it covers LInkedIn? I didn’t see it any of your comments or your conclusion of the software so I thought I had better be safe than sorry before committing!
No LinkedIn is not included. I dont usually go for anything that I have to pay for but there comes a point where you have to invest a little to get the engagement you want and its a safer way of investing than in ads.
Thanks so much for sharing your favorite resource for the best social media scheduler. There are a ton of them out there. I’ve got one for my website — it’s a feature of another “pro” tool that has an annual cost — but I haven’t been able to figure out quite how to get it to work for me. It’s certainly not easy or intuitive.
Can you expand briefly on the other tools that you looked into? No need for an elaborate explanation, but I’m just curious which others you could quickly mark off of your list as not being a good fit / use of time.
Thanks in advance! This is very helpful!!!
I took a look at Hootsuite which is also another scheduler, but I found it less intuitive than Tailwind and decided that life was too short to get to grips with that as well. For me to do justice to a schedule I need to unravel it and once I had done it for Tailwind and found it amazing to use, I couldn’t suggest any other.
Nice job here, except for the title. I expected to see reports on other schedulers also. But you did live up to the title as I also feel that Tailwind is the best. That’s who I use and everyone I talk to that uses a scheduler also swears by Tailwind. But it would have been interesting to see how you rated the others. Overall, a nice job though.
I decided that I wasn’t going to write a review on various different schedulers as I couldn’t see the point when I was already using the best scheduler on the market. By that point the article was already being written with that title. so Ive left it. I dont want to change the permalink now that it is indexed.
Hi Helen. I do agree that posting at Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest its time consuming and also sometimes overwhelming. The social media I use for posting my articles is Facebook, but I also have Instagram and Pinterest profiles which stay in the shadow because I don’t have time to post frequently there. The other thing is that I don’t get much traffic through Facebook and I start thinking of being more active on Instagram so I can see where is the better place to post my articles. I want to thank you for the useful information you share in your latest article. It makes it much easier for people like me who want to grow their website traffic and become more successful.
Thankyou Petar, Tailwind is a great platform for scheduling but it is a tool that we have to pay for which is the downside.
Tailwind is an awesome platform, I like the fact you can now schedule your Instagram post and get awesome hashtags too(which makes a huge plus). I am a beginner and I am not yet ready to spend that much money in my business yet.
But for what I can say, tailwind has brought my business from zero to more than a thousand followers on Pinterest and more than 250 on Instagram. AS soon as my business plan is ready, I will definitely go for a paid tailwind account.
Thanks for the great review!
Its great news to hear that you are getting engagement with the free version and of course that will increase with the paid version, but I agree with you, you have to be at the right point in your business to use it.
Thank you for your post. It is a timely article for me. I spend a lot of time on social media and everyday I need to post on twitter, facebook, and pinterest etc. I have been thinking about ways to help me dealing with the posting, but never take time to do the research.
Here comes you article, which is very helpful. I am impressed by the power of Tailwind, which allows a constant presence without having to pin all day long, pinning at regular intervals so no spamming, best engagement, share, and automation.
Tailwind is such a powerful tool that I could save a lot time, which allows me to do more. I am definitely going to try it.
Its definitely worth a try, Anthony. It offers a free trail so you can test it out first. But i have found it so worthwhile and I spend Sunday evening pinning and posting the schedule. its doesn’t take longer than about and hour or so to make the pins and schedule. So worth the time.
This is really informative, it is really helpful for upcoming entreprenuers, this will be a great idea, though Tailwind social scheduler is a paying site, it has a great qualities which will make people to invest in it like scheduling of post,posting at the best time of your engagement and also monitor your pins and offer analytical on them,but it is a good site unlike facebook, whatsapp and instagram which are free yet there is no much traffic there.. Thanks for sharing
Yes thats all very true Alexy. The beauty of Tailwind is that you can do three things at once! Pin to Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram ! Great time saver.