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As a blogger, I’m always keeping my eye out for new ways to get my site in front of new eyes.

This means the utilization of any social media platform available, and a regular effort to optimize the visibility of my posts, graphics, and logo.

In my opinion, marketing is one of the most exciting yet difficult parts of being a blogger.

One of my favorite ways to market myself is with Pinterest. It’s a very powerful tool, and if your audience is composed primarily of women like mine is, you know this to be especially true. (You probably don’t need a report to tell you this, but according to a December 2015 statistics report, 85% of all Pinterest users are female.) However, I think that most bloggers would agree that it’s a very powerful tool for all niches.

Did you know you can schedule pins on #Pinterest? Get started for free with @TailwindApp

Pinterest was my number one referrer for several months (you can read about my current Pinterest strategy here) back when I was starting out (which is funny because my images were lame and my fonts and colors looked super unprofessional…AND my images were never vertical) but then when I stopped focusing on Pinterest and started working on other social media platforms, my Pinterest referrals and growth slowed WAYYYY down.

Like depressingly low.

I’d been spending a lot of time each day working on pinning other bloggers’ things, tidying up my boards, and looking for more group boards to follow. I was also following other people like crazy hoping for reciprocation.

I felt like I was spending too much time doing everything on social media and there was so much I wanted to get done that I couldn’t with the amount of time I was spending there. So I let up a little on my Pinterest efforts.

There had to be a more efficient way of doing things.

…and there was! I just didn’t know about it yet!

Today Pinterest is once again my top referrer, even though I’ve changed the way I use it and spend less time on it. How have I kept growing despite putting less effort into Pinterest?

The answer is… Pinterest schedulers!

The most common and popular schedulers are BoardBooster and Tailwind. I regularly see people weighing the pros and cons and talking about why they prefer one or the other. But the basic gist of it is–both programs allow you to Pin content more efficiently (so that you don’t have to do it manually every day at different times) and more quickly so that you can make sure that you are highly visible to your ideal readers.

I’ll be honest and say that while I’d heard of both BoardBooster and Tailwind before, I didn’t start using either of them until about two months ago when I came upon one of those blogger discussions in a Facebook group.

Some people loved BoardBooster, others loved Tailwind. People were quite divided, regardless of the type of blog they had.

So what was a girl to do without any definitive answers from fellow bloggers?

Well, try them both, of course!

Both platforms offer free trials, so why the heck wouldn’t I try them both?

BoardBooster offers your first 500 pins free, and Tailwind offers your first month free. I signed up for both, and these were my first impressions:

BoardBooster:

  • Kind of unprofessional looking presentation (doesn’t affect functionality but I just don’t like the way their site looks, kinda wonder how male bloggers like the butterflies.)
  • Kind of confusing to understand how each thing works
  • Super cool looping tool
  • Confusing to have secret boards, makes my Pinterest feel “messy”
  • Totally fair pricing ($0.01/pin)

Tailwind:

  • Love the professional look of the site
  • Love the Chrome extension that makes it easy to schedule anything in bulk
  • No looping tool 🙁
  • A bit pricey in comparison to BoardBooster IF you use the monthly option ($15/month for 400 pins or $9/month when you pay for a year in full.) Update: One of my super awesome readers pointed out that if you have annual billing, pins are unlimited with Tailwind, that is some HUGE bang for your buck!
  • Super clear & useful analytics page
  • Awesome tools like Board Lists and Tribes – which make it super fast to pin large quantities and find relevant content (mom bloggers – please join my TRIBE!)

As you can see (and you know if you’ve used either program), there are definitely perks to having some sort of scheduler. I have an exact count of how many repins I had in a particular month, and I don’t have to spend hours manually pinning things. I know which pins and boards are performing the best.

So which is better?

All of the things I mentioned are great perks to using a scheduler for Pinterest, but after having completed both free trials, I’m going to have to say, it’s still a bit of tie! I guess it’s just a preference thing, but both programs have things the other doesn’t.

But I do want to let you know about the two MAJOR discoveries I made so that you can make an informed decision if you are getting serious about your blog and making this type of investment beyond a free trial:

  1. Looping (which only BoardBooster has) is ah-may-zing. It basically goes through your old pins and revives them. You can drive traffic to your old posts automatically and customize this so that no one pin is being seen too often or too seldom. It’s really cool!
  2. Tailwind has partnered with Pinterest. You can read about what this means in this post from Tailwind, but basically, it means that Pinterest is going to give preference, and therefore higher priority to pins scheduled with Tailwind…this supposedly translates to higher visibility.

In the end, I started paying for Tailwind because I think it just fits me better and I really love that they are partners with Pinterest. However, I decided to stick with a monthly plan (that can be cancelled any time) in case I decided to experiment with BoardBooster more later.

So, I want to know…are you using either program? If not…

What’s your excuse?

You really have nothing to lose by starting a free trial (or two, like me!) to get your Pinterest account taken care of more efficiently.

If you’re a fellow blogger that has just gotten started, I hope that you find this post helpful and enlightening!

If you’re a blogger that’s been putting off optimization of your Pinterest account–stop it! Stop, right now! Free and easy promo is YOURS with both of these programs, at least to get started.

Are you like me and you’ve tried them both? How are you liking it/them? Tell me below! I want to know!

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