If you’re an avid reader of the Shake Social blog, you’ll know by now that planning and scheduling social media content ahead of time is one of the absolute saviours for your business when it comes to time management, audience engagement and overall productivity. Pinterest, which is used by lots of different audiences to showcase a variety of content, is no exception to this rule.

Whilst there’s still no way to schedule pins directly within Pinterest, there are a number of services which offer a way for users to schedule their Pinterest content ahead of time. In this post, we’re going to focus on Tailwind, our Pinterest-scheduling weapon of choice due to its intuitive ‘smart scheduling’ and innovative browser extension.

Smart scheduling

One of the key aspects of working out a content schedule for any social media site is researching (or guessing) when your content will reach its maximum intended audience numbers, and Tailwind takes a lot of the hassle out of this process for Pinterest. Once you’ve created an account and signed in, Tailwind will use its own data, the data from the type of content you pin regularly, and the activity of audience members on Pinterest to provide you with automatically generated time-slots for your pins. In addition to these, you can add any of your preferred custom time slots to this calendar. Your schedule will then look something like this:

Getting the browser extension

The next thing to do once you’ve checked your smart schedule is to install the browser extension for Tailwind. We’ve used the extension for Chrome, but there are also extensions for Firefox and Safari. Once you’ve downloaded it, the Tailwind icon will appear in the top right hand corner of your browser window. Whether you’re on a Pinterest page or any page of the web, hovering over an image will show the Tailwind ‘Schedule’ button, which works in a similar way to the ‘Pin It’ button.

Wherever you are on the web, clicking the Tailwind button in the top right corner will isolate and pull all the images on that page together in the window and give you the option to select any or all of them for scheduling. Magic.

Editing your pins

When you’ve selected all the things you want to pin, hit ‘Go Schedule’ in the bottom right hand corner. Tailwind then pulls a simple interface with all the selected pins and the ability to edit them just like you would in Pinterest. There’s an added bonus too: if all the pins you’ve selected are for a specific board, and you don’t want to go through the tedious task of selecting the same board for each pin, you can select the board in the ‘Add Pins to All’ bar at the top – and you can select multiple boards for this too.

Custom timing & shuffling your pins

Once you click ‘Schedule All’ in the top right hand corner, your pins will be assigned in the order you selected them into the timeslots in your smart schedule – saving you a lot of time from selecting these times individually. In the next window, there’ll be a calendar on the right-hand side of the screen which shows all the pins you’ve selected for scheduling. As you can see, the three pins we selected earlier have been added to the end of the queue. The empty boxes represent the time slots that haven’t been assigned a pin yet.

If you don’t want the pins to be scheduled in the same order that you selected them, you can drag and drop each pin into a preferred order. Alternatively, you can simply click ‘Shuffle Queue’ to reorder the pins. If there are certain pins that you want to schedule for a certain time or on a certain day, you can add a custom time for this pin by clicking on its assigned time, changing it to your preferred time, and clicking ‘Set Custom Time’. Another great feature on Tailwind is that even if you hit ‘Shuffle Queue’ after you’ve set Custom Times for certain pins, these pins will stay fixed in place, whilst the other ones are shuffled around them.

Canva and Instagram integration

Tailwind have also integrated Canva and Instagram into their service – meaning you can create beautiful, Pinterest-worthy content in Canva and add it directly into your schedule. You can also sync your Instagram account with Tailwind, which will allow you to schedule any of your Instagram posts straight to Pinterest. An additional nifty feature allows you to order your Instagram content selection based on ‘Most Recent’, ‘Most Liked’ and ‘Most Commented’, helping you to decide which posts to schedule.

Tailwind combines intuitive analytics, an easy-to-use interface and a great range of content creation options, and it gets Shake Social’s seal of approval for enabling and simplifying the scheduling process on Pinterest.

Check it out yourself, and let us know how you get on. If you have any questions, add these in the comments below too.

By Olivia Rose French

Olivia is an expert writer, blogging enthusiast and Copywriter at Shake Social.

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