I have been doing content marketing for over six years now. One of my key findings is you must work as hard to promote your content as you do create it. Pinterest has always been at the top of my promotion sites for getting referrals to my website. Many of my favorite Pinterest tools contribute.
Social media has come a long way since I started as have the strategies, tactics, methods, and power associated with social media.
In reality, a successful social media marketing campaign is multi-dimensional. It’s complicated. Ask any social media marketer “How do you do social media marketing?” and you’re likely to get the “Um, where do I start?” look.
There are a lot of elements to address and minute details to cover. Often, the most difficult stage is the initial one, when you’re trying to gain traction and pick up momentum.
If you’re not sure which tools to use, check out this list from Keyhole. It highlights 25 different social media analytics tools and should point you in the right direction.
Pinterest has seen dramatic growth since its inception, with well over 70 million users worldwide. Even though Pinterest is now concentrating on growing internationally, most of its appeal is still focused in the US, where over 70% of the users are young, affluent women, itching to spend their money. A study by Rich Relevance shows that the average order placed by Pinterest shoppers is $169, compared to $95 on Facebook, and $70 on Twitter.
Check out these ready-made Pinterest graphics here (a handful of them are free): https://www.canva.com/
How about you? Are you on the lookout for ideas on measuring your Pinterest activity?
What about tools that can help you grow your followers on Pinterest?
In this blog, I’ll discuss my favorite apps to help you analyze and grow your presence on Pinterest.
Why Pinterest Tools?
The average Pinterest user follows nine brands and spends just over 15 minutes on the platform.
That means to be competitive and, better yet, lucky; you have to be able to serve up fantastic images, measure the impact of your selections and connect and engage with new followers on a regular basis.
If you don’t have a large time budget to sink into your Pinterest efforts, investing integrating the time-saving shortcuts and functions of a few affordable tools can work wonders.
Here are my recommended Pinterest tools worth your consideration:
Favorite Pinterest tools … Picmonkey
Pinterest is Images. And pic monkey is one of the best free image creation tools out there. You can maximize the impact of your business on Pinterest, by really focusing on creating great eye-catching images. You can explore creative ways to turn not only your product images but reviews, case studies, and guides into great visual content.
Picmonkey allows you to resize your pictures, overlay pictures with text, and create collages. It is also very easy to use!
This is by no means the only Pinterest tools that are out there, but this one covers key areas of analytics, content creation, and engagement, that are necessary for your Pinterest marketing strategy.
If there are any tools that you use for Pinterest Marketing that is not included, then please let us know in the comments below.
Pinterest analytics tools … Tailwind
While Pinterest provides some basic analytics to help you assess the performance of your Pinterest account, if you want more advanced analytics and the ability to analyze your competitors, Tailwind is a good application for you. It features:
- Growth Tracking of fans, followers, boards, likes, and pins—View graph reports based on default or custom date ranges. Track the volume of pins from your website.
- Audience Engagement Details—Find trending pins, your top repinners, most influential followers and a table of the people who share content the most.
- Content Optimization—View details for each piece of content to help you decide how to optimize (e.g., see the time and day of the week when most pins occur).
- ROI Measurement—Through integration with Google Analytics, see the website traffic and revenue that’s generated from Pinterest and view the individuals who drove that traffic.
- Competitor Benchmarking—Benchmark, your analytics against your competitors.
- Collaboration—Share your account with multiple team members.
- Enterprise Features—At the corporate level, you can create custom reports, set up keyword monitoring and run influencer campaigns to identify, vet and recruit key influencers.
There’s a paid version of Tailwind, but you can start with the free version. Just enter your Pinterest username and select the Create Free Dashboard option.
Pin Groupie
Group boards are an excellent way of getting your pins out there, and increasing traffic to your website. But, hours can be spent trawling through Pinterest looking for ideal group boards in your niche. Pinterest do not provide a search facility specifically for group boards, and up till recently, the main way of finding out about group boards was through the few Pinners who created pages just rammed with group boards, or through a google search, so obviously wasn’t ideal!
Now you will be pleased to know; there is a great little site out there called PinGroupie which takes all the hassle out of locating those elusive group boards. It will allow you to search by category, and also see the board description directly on the website, which is great to see if the board is a good fit for your business.
PinAlerts
PinAlerts helps keep you informed of any items that are pinned onto your boards from your site. You can even track when images are pinned from your competitors’ websites.
Pinalerts sends you notifications via email when someone has pinned directly from your site.
This is an excellent way of finding out which of your articles or images on your site are popular on Pinterest, and are being pinned. This then allows you to focus more on creating content that is going to be popular.
It also identifies the pinner, so you can then go to their page and thank them for pinning your content. Chances are, they will then go and check out your website again. This is great regarding building a community of followers and increasing engagement. Pinterest Analytics will only show you who has re-pinned content from your Pinterest page, not your website.
These alerts are particularly useful if you want to grow your following on Pinterest.
As you find people who pin content from a competitor or who pin content relevant to your brand, you can use the live Pinned By link to visit their profile and follow them. You can also click on the Board Name link to find out where they’re pinning the image and follow the board. It’s very likely they’ll follow you back.
PinAlerts is a simple but useful application that lets you keep an eye on who is pinning content from your competitor’s website. Use the alerts to find out what content is popular and find new followers.
Pinvolve
If your brand already has a growing Facebook fan base, it makes sense to let your fans know about your Pinterest boards. But sometimes a status update and link don’t do the trick.
Pinvolve is an application that installs on Facebook to display images from your Pinterest boards right on your Facebook page. It features include:
- Display content from your Pinterest account—Synchronize Pinvolve with your Pinterest account and view yourPinterest images.
- Display content from your Facebook page—Display Facebook timeline images in a Pinterest-like fashion through the application.
Pinvolve is a great app that lets you increase the visibility of your pins to your Facebook audience. If they’re also Pinterest users, the app lets them scan through and repin your Pinterest posts without leaving Facebook. Very useful!
Pinstamatic
If you want to be successful on Pinterest, good imagery is a must. Since we’re not all graphic artists, tools that make it easier to design, great images help even the playing field!
Pinstamatic uses standard templates to “make boring data pretty”—especially text. This tool lets you turn quotes, location links and even websites into beautiful images for pinning. Some of its features include:
Create a variety of Pinterest images using eight different templates to share:
- Websites
- Quote text
- Sticky notes
- Spotify music
- Twitter profiles
- Calendar dates
- Places
- Photos
To be successful on Pinterest, you need imaginative images. Pinstamatic helps you turn out engaging, pinnable images with ease.
Fotor
Fotor is a cross-platform photo-editing application that provides a lot of great functionality for editing images, and it’s completely free.
While you can’t pin your images from inside Fotor, you can do fantastic editing on your pictures before you share them out on Pinterest.
Viraltag
If you want to make your life easier, but still pin to Pinterest on a regular basis, then you need a scheduling tool. There are many benefits of scheduling your pins, rather than having a pinning frenzy:
It saves you time! Rather than getting carried away on Pinterest, you schedule your pins, then stop!
People can get annoyed if their home feed is cluttered up with your numerous images of shoes … they might even unfollow you!
More people will see your pins if you spread them out over the day, and especially if you schedule for busy times.
Quozio
Quozio lets you create images related to quotes, and it offers 37 different formats to choose from. It’s very simple to use. Just enter in a quote and its source, then pin it.
The bottom line
The tools we covered here are either free or low-cost. They let you measure success, improve your images and increase the visibility of your pins. Any one of them can help you maximize the benefit of using Pinterest for your business.
Need some help in building better customer insights from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer base?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job of growing customer insights and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
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When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
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Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:
Lessons from the Yale Customer Insights Conference
Small Business Customer Insights 101
Remarkable Marketing Using These 17 Customer Insight Techniques
A How-to Guide for Small Business Social Media Marketing
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.