Scheduling Pins with Tailwind to Collaborative Boards

Have you had a chance to digest all of Tailwind goodness from last week?  Did you dive in and try it?  Are you still trying to wrap your head around it?  I spent a little time last week exploring Tailwind (an online pinterest pin scheduler) a bit more to help my fellow business owners get a sense of what they can do with a Tailwind subscription and how much time they can save themselves.  If you missed my other posts in the series, you can find them here:
Why I Love Using Tailwind For My Business
Getting Started with Tailwind
Scheduling Pins with Tailwind

Today I am focusing on scheduling for collaborative boards.  This was my biggest hang up when I first started using Tailwind and I'm going to show you some ways that you can use Tailwind when pinning to a collaborative board.

Now let's start with collaborative boards - what are they?  When I first started using Pinterest for business it was the be all and end of marketing your products.  It was a board that was hosted by one person that allowed many people to pin to it.  Often some of the bigger boards had thousands and tens of thousands of followers making this prime real estate for your pins.  I could post a new product, pin an image (usually a crappy image of the cover or one of the inside pages) to a collaborative board and sell a few products within the hour.  But times have changed my friends.

First of all, covers and pictures of your slides don't cut it as pins anymore.  You need pictures of your products in action.

Second, since Pinterest changed its algorithm, a lot has changed.  They don't really want you to have free advertising.  Pinning directly from Teachers Pay Teachers or Etsy isn't as good as pinning from your blog because those are sites that sell things and Pinterest wants you to pay to advertise, so I've heard they don't rank these pins as high.  Play around with it and see what works for you, but I try to pin my products from blog posts and not from my store.  Another thing that I have read is that since the algorithm change, collaborative boards aren't as important and helpful as they once were.  What?  So I've finally joined these boards, I'm getting repins and now you are telling me they aren't important!!  AHHH!!!  I can't win.  So what did I do?  Well, I read about the importance of your boards being quality.  Before this, I was so focused on pinning to collaborative boards because they had way more followers than me.  Now my focus is building my boards.  I've gone back and tried to delete pins that don't fit for that board and organize my boards better.  Ive also been working on adding more pins to my boards.  I'm still pinning on collaborative boards but try to keep my focus on improving my boards and account.  I've also deleted/left some collaborative boards that weren't great.  If they were full of products, not my target audience, not a lot of followers, not many repins, I deleted them so that I could just focus on a handful.

When I first started with Tailwind, I was baffled at how I could follow the rules of a collaborative board.  In an effort to make their boards not all products, many board owners set up rules like 5 freebies for every paid product, or pin 3 related pins for each product pin, etc.  It makes sense and it is much better to look at a board that has a variety of ideas, blog posts, videos, books, products, etc.  The problem is that my times that Tailwind schedules my pins are not necessarily close together.  So I could schedule out 3 freebies and 1 product pin right after each other but they might not show up on the boards near each other.  When I was in Vegas last summer for the TpT conference, I asked a bunch of other pinners and Tailwind users how they solved this problem.  The conclusion I reached is that they don't worry about the rules as much.  Since they were pinning more consistently, they made sure to regularly schedule freebies and blog posts to these collaborative boards so that when they scheduled a product pin to that same board, they didn't feel bad because they knew they had been posting other quality pins to the board.  Plus, with the way the smart feed has taken over, the pins weren't showing up in the order you pinned them anyway.  I liked this theory and went with it.  None of the owners of boards said anything so I thought it was all good.

Until I got called out by a board owner and reminded to have 3 freebies for my product pin.  Man, did I feel stupid.  I asked her for suggestions for doing this with Tailwind.  She said she didn't have suggestions since she didn't use Tailwind.  I was feeling worse and worse.  So I decided to go straight to the source and ask Tailwind.

Tailwind calls this rules based pinning and they said they do not have anything in place at this time specifically for this, but they are hoping that their new 2.0 platform will allow for something in the near future.  In the meantime, she suggested this for boards that are strict about surrounding your product pins with other non product pins.

I was going to pin a pin that is all about my States and Capitals Task Cards.  So I went to Pinterest and searched other ideas about states and capitals that a teacher teaching this topic might be interested in.  I found videos, books and a fun iconographic.

Then to schedule them, click the little clock at the bottom.  This will allow you to pick a specific day and time.  I didn't worry about it being one of my scheduled time slots.  I just picked a time that is near those times in the evening when I know most of my pins go out.  I went through each of these 5 pins and scheduled them for the same day and around the same time (they were all within minutes of each other.)

Once they were all ready, I clicked schedule.  You can see now on the right side, they are all scheduled and locked in that day and time.

Now they will all show up on that board near each other which will hopefully make a board owner happy and catch a teacher's eye since they are all related topics.

Is this more work?  YES!  Is it impossible?  NO!

Here is my advice (at this moment in time - Pinterest is always changing, I am always learning, so this could all be different a year from now.)

1.  For the boards that you are a collaborator on that have STRICT pinning rules, use this strategy above.  Schedule your product pin and then your other free and quality ideas around the same time.

2.  For boards, that aren't as strict, continue pinning great ideas, freebies, and blog posts that offer value to the followers of that board.  Occasionally, throw in a product pin.

3.  Build up your own boards.  Don't focus too much on the collaborative boards.  Make your Pinterest account one that others want to follow because they love the board topics and when they click on a board it is filled with great ideas, not just products you've made.  As you are finding pins to build these boards, share them on collaborative boards at the same time.  (Check out THIS post for learning how to pin the same pin to multiple boards.)

This wraps up my series on Tailwind.  If you have any questions, let me know in the comments and I'll try to help as best I can.

If you want to try out a free month of Tailwind, you can click HERE. (This is an affiliate link if you would like to use it.  If not, you might be able to still get a free trial if you contact Tailwind.  They currently have a promo going on until the end of March I believe where if you sign up for a Plus account you get $30 off and so do I  - that's a few months of free pinning!)

UPDATE:  Since writing this series, I've taken a course called Pinning Perfect.  I cannot recommend it enough.  It really changed my Pinterest strategy and improved my account.  I still use Tailwind even more than I was before this class.  If you are looking to improve your Pinterest game to promote your blog/business, check out this class.  You won't be sorry.  I'm including my affiliate link - just click the picture if you are interested.