Before we look into the top Pinterest tools, let’s first debunk the Pinterest myth.
Even a few short years ago, Pinterest was a relatively unknown social media network.
Why?
Because it had a niche: young women with disposable income.
It wasn’t until recently that the men started signing up in large numbers. Maybe that isn’t surprising: Pinterest is dominated by “planning” activities. That could be a craft project, or building that model ship you’ve wanted.
Alternately, an exotic vacation or dream wedding could be the topic of a Pinterest board. It’s mostly women that do these kinds of things.
However, that doesn’t mean Pinterest isn’t valuable to marketers. After all, Pinterest statistics show us that most Pinterest users make purchases after using the network. Plus, men and corporate decision makers are increasing their presence here.
Arguably, if you aren’t marketing on Pinterest you’re missing out on a lot of leads.
To help you with Pinterest marketing, a wide variety of tools are available. One of the most important things Pinterest tools can do is automatically post content while you’re busy with work. With the right tools, you can also make posts that really pop, and participate in Pinterest groups that help potential customers find you. Lastly, promotion and analytics tools help ensure you’re reaching the right audience. Let’s look at a few of these Pinterest tools that I highly recommend.
Pinterest Management tools
Making sure that you’re posting at the right time is a great way to ensure your pins get viewed, shared and re-pinned. At the same time, you want to make sure that the pins you post are effectively marketing your goods and services. Management tools are what you need to maximize your efforts.
Tailwind
For those who want to schedule an entire week’s worth of content in 15 minutes, Tailwind is a great tool. That’s because they have an easy-to-use drag and drop user interface that helps you really see how something is going to come out. And, it also monitors Pinterest to see who’s re-pinning your stuff, what they’re saying about you, and stuff you should discover to help your own efforts. Another Tailwind tool on Pinterest is the Tribes section. Tribes are online communities of marketers within the same niche. The idea is that you can compare notes with each other, and pool resources as appropriate. Think industry-wide collaboration. Lastly, there’s Smart Loop, which allows you to repost old content. For instance, you can use a New Year’s Eve ad the next year, automatically.
Pricing: free trial, then $9.99 monthly per account. You can also add a couple “power ups” at $4.99 each.
Viraltag
Run a small business or starting out as an agency? Then Viraltag is a good choice. That’s because it has all the essential features of a social media manager, without a bunch of bloated bells and whistles that you don’t need but have to pay for. Need to collaborate with your in-house team? That’s where this software excels. It’s also compatible with other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In other words, this tool isn’t just for Pinterest greatness because it can handle a large proportion of your needs. There’s also an integration with Canva, a tool we’ll discuss later. Also, analytics provided do more than report: they’re translated into actionable insights, so you don’t have to guess what the numbers mean. Finally, in addition to the usual Web and mobile apps, Viraltag has a Chrome extension that helps you grab cool stuff from the Internet.
Pricing: 14-day trial, then $24 per month for individuals, $79 for small businesses, and $249 and up for larger businesses. There are slight differences in features between the plans.
Viralwoot
Do you like to be spontaneous with your pins? If so, you might enjoy Viralwoot. This app is more than just a Pinterest scheduler. Rather, it lets you look for pictures on Google, then pin them. You can repin other people’s content, or your own, without leaving the app. Within the scheduler, Viralwoot has a great feature for agencies with international reach: it lets you manage more than one Pinterest account, and set a different time zone for each, allowing you to maximize the reach of each account. Other features include an Influencer finder, analytics component, and a browser extension that lets you work from home. Viralwoot is Pinterest only, with the exception of an iOS app that works on Instagram.
Pricing: Standard accounts are $10 monthly, and business accounts cost $49 per month. Choose depending on how many accounts you’re managing, and if you need Google analytics.
Pin Creation tools
No compilation of Pinterest tools is complete without a few content creation aids. After all, these are what let us put our best face forward on Pinterest. And, isn’t great content the whole point of Pinterest marketing, anyway? Here are some great tools to help make those pins memorable.
Canva
Need a really great pin that really pops? Graphic design is a great way to achieve this, and Canva is a super easy program to help you succeed. They’ll help you make graphs, infographics, and logos for your business. There’s a huge clip art library, many types of document/graphics templates, and fancy fonts. In other words, within your brand standards there’s nothing to limit your creativity. If you’re unsure whether or not you’ll like this program, there’s a limited free version. It won’t allow you to use branding, but if you get a paid subscription they’ll even keep track of that branded graphic content within your own special storage area. Other features in the paid version include collaboration tools and more customer support.
Pricing: the paid versions are per user, costing $9.99 monthly or $30.00 monthly, depending on what features you need.
Stencil
No, this isn’t a series of cutout shapes for painting or drawing. Instead Stencil is a comprehensive graphic design application, and it isn’t much harder to use than those literal stencils. There are loads of Google and other fonts to use, allowing for basic graphic design in seconds. In addition, Stencil users have access to millions of stock photos, icons, and graphics. For brand consistency, you can upload your own fonts, color sets, and branded logos. They even have browser extensions available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Didn’t find what you need to make that perfect pin? You can design something in a snap.
Pricing: There’s a limited free version, and then annual subscription prices average to $9.00 and $12.00 monthly.
Crello
Would you like a graphic design program that lets you add animation to your social media posts? This is something Crello does well. Besides animation, Crello allows you to add video and all kinds of special effects to your work. Essentially, this is a full-featured graphic design application. They even help you design cards and other things that can be printed, so this is an added plus if your agency works with print media or direct mail marketing. It even comes with video editing capabilities, making this app multifunctional
Pricing: there’s a basic free version, and a premium version that’s $7.99 per month if you pay for a whole year.
PicMonkey
For those that prefer a bare bones photo editing tool, PicMonkey is an option to consider. That’s because this app focuses almost entirely on editing photos. There are enhancement features and filters, and opportunities to add words to your picture. For instance, you can change the hair color of a model and remove red eye, or add your favorite saying. Keep in mind: they provide the fonts and templates, but you must provide the pictures.
Pricing: there are three tiers, basic ($7.99/mo), pro ($12.99/mo), and team (group discount on pro membership).
Snappa
Marketing teams where more than one person designs the pins would love Snappa. The program is fully featured like Canva or Stencil, but Snappa has better collaboration tools. In particular, you can upload designs and fonts, and designate team colors for everyone to use. Need to adjust who works on what? Just push a few buttons.
Pricing: there’s a limited free plan, an individual plan at $10.00 per month, and a team plan that starts at $30 for 5 users.
Pinterest Group Boards
Are you the sort of person who likes to collaborate with people in other companies? Who likes to get ideas and share war stories from others in the same niche? Then you might enjoy these tools.
Tailwind Tribes
Tailwind Tribes is a part of the Tailwind tool discussed above. It allows you to join or participate in “tribes” related to your niche and both find pins to curate to keep your followers happy and boards active while also allowing you to publish pins to the tribe that others can repin as part of their content curation efforts.
If you want to learn more about Tailwind Tribes, feel free to join my tribe: Blogging & Social Media Marketing Pros
PinGroupie
This is a great way to find people with the same interests. With PinGroupie, you can look through the directory to find group boards that you’d enjoy. For example, there are group boards featuring pets, and others related to travel. Group boards are also a place to call attention to your brand’s less branded pins, hopefully gaining followers in the process.
Pricing: Free.
Pinterest Promotion Tools
What’s a great Pinterest pin or story without promotion? After all, what’s the point of doing this if everything we post gets lost in a sea of pins? Here are tools to solve that problem.
Pinterest Widget Builder
You DO want people to post stuff from your website onto Pinterest, right? The Pinterest Widget Builder is a Pinterest tool that allows website developers to include a Pinterest posting widget on their website. It also can be built as a link to your Pinterest profile. Neat, huh?
MiloTree
Let’s be honest with ourselves. No matter how good of a job we do with social media and content marketing, a large number of customers will come to our website and leave. That’s where MiloTree comes in. Use it to build what they call “the only popup you’ll ever need” for your website. These are GDPR compliant popups that collect customer information or direct them to our social media profiles, including Pinterest. Use them to get more social followers of all types. You can also use MiloTree to grow your email lists as it integrates with email clients.
For more info, listen to my podcast interview with the founder of MiloTree.
Pricing: $9 per month after 30 day trial.
Woobox
Need to build a campaign advertising your Pinterest profile? You can do that with Woobox. One method you can use is a contest, with the price of entry being following your Pinterest profile. Advertise your contest on Facebook, for example. Another method is adding a tab on your Facebook account that lets people see content posted on Pinterest without leaving Facebook. Overall, there’s a wide variety of tools to bring in subscribers.
Pricing: there’s a limited-use free version, and the cheapest paid plan is $32 per month.
TastyPins
Are you trying to figure out how to publish pins on your blog posts but leaving them invisible but appearing only when people want to pin an image from your post?
The answer is TastyPins.
Pinterest Pins are large in size and can disrupt the viewing of a blog post, so many bloggers who are active on Pinterest decide to “hide” their pins but make them visible when someone decides to pin from their page.
The other advantage of TastyPins is that it allows you to create both an Alt-Text version for search engines as well as a Pinterest description for every pin that you upload. This ensures that your pin images are optimized for both search and Pinterest.
Pricing: One-time purchase at $29.00.
Pinterest Analytics Tools
It almost goes without saying, but all of us marketers need to keep track of our analytics. Sure, some of our social media managers will give us a lot of information. But, you want to make sure you aren’t missing anything. Don’t forget:
Pinterest Analytics (native inside Pinterest)
If you want an idea how your native pins are performing, nothing beats Pinterest Analytics itself. That’s because your social media manager mostly watches paid pins and ads. Not only that, but they offer you insight on the people that interact with your posts. Demographics information (or at least educated guesses) are pure gold.
What are your favorite Pinterest tools? Let me know in the comments.
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
Neal Schaffer is a leading authority on helping businesses through their digital transformation of sales and marketing through consulting, training, and helping enterprises large and small develop and execute on social media marketing strategy, influencer marketing, and social selling initiatives. President of the social media agency PDCA Social, Neal also teaches digital media to executives at Rutgers University, the Irish Management Institute (Ireland), and the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland). Fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, Neal is a popular keynote speaker and has been invited to speak about digital media on four continents in a dozen countries. He is also the author of 3 books on social media, including Maximize Your Social (Wiley), and in late 2019 will publish his 4th book, The Business of Influence (HarperCollins), on educating the market on the why and how every business should leverage the potential of influencer marketing. Neal resides in Irvine, California but also frequently travels to Japan.