Three ways to automate Pinterest posts
Pinterest is a great social media platform for a lot of businesses. If what you sell is very visually-oriented, it’s at least worth considering the audience on Pinterest, the level of effort the platform would require from you, and seeing if you should be on it.
As far as the effort Pinterest requires, some of that is going to be based on your comfort level with the platform. But some of the effort is going to be based on the native capabilities of Pinterest and how nicely the platform plays with other online tools.
Pinterest has been a challenge for us in the past, because one of the best ways to simplify your online marketing on any given platform is to automate or pre-schedule your posts. And we love Hootsuite for scheduling posts, but you can’t currently schedule for Pinterest through Hootsuite. They don’t play nice together.
We have found some tools that we can use to automate our Pinterest posts, though! If you’re using Pinterest for your organization, these tools can help you save time and effort
1. Tailwind
We’ve spoken about Tailwind before, and it’s a great scheduling tool for Pinterest. And they have strong Oklahoma ties too!
Tailwind is an affordable tool and allows you to schedule pins in batches ahead of time. Find out how to schedule through Tailwind in this blog post!
2. WordPress to Zapier to Pinterest
Publishing blogs to your WordPress site? You can hook Zapier up to your WordPress account and set up a Zap to automatically create a pin anytime a blog post is scheduled!
Two things to keep in mind here: Make sure the Zap’s trigger is when the blog is published, not when it’s uploaded (if you’re pre-scheduling blogs onto your WordPress site). And have an appealing hero image for your blog posts, since Pinterest is so centered on visuals.
3. Instagram to Zapier to Pinterest
In a similar way, if you’re already using Instagram, you can set up Zapier to auto-post your Instagram photos to a particular board on your Pinterest account. Since our Instagram account is all about company culture, we’ve created a Pinterest board showcasing our company culture, and all our Instagram posts automatically get posted to that board by Zapier. We’ve run into a couple of issues with this in the brief time we’ve used this method, but for the most part it works. And for us, the time it saves is worth the minor issues we need to correct.
Do these methods require a bit of work at the beginning? Definitely. But we’ve found both Tailwind and Zapier to be useful tools, and worth the initial effort to set things up.
If Pinterest is something that makes sense for your organization, a little bit of work to set up one (or all) of these automated posting systems could save you a lot of time and keep your Pinterest account regularly updated!