Pinterest sales are double the amount of Facebook’s, and Pinterest’s images have lifespans 3000x’s longer than Facebook’s. If you make evergreen images, they may be repinned over and over again. Women use to dominate the Pinterest audience, at 71% audience share, but that has shifted, and both men and women are half-and-half, pinning recipes, style guides, life hacks, home DIYs and more. Pinterest is the place to find, reach and convert your target audience.

I love this platform, and I’m not alone in that love. It’s so easy to spend the day pinning away and posting there!

Where does that time go?

To be smashing on Pinterest, you need to achieve a regular posting schedule of wonderful content so you can reach your target audience and get them to follow you. More followers means more traffic to your blog or website, and more traffic increases your chances of user-generated pins, and more pins has the happy result of reaching your audience, triggering a happy cycle.

Streamlining Your Daily Pinterest Activities

To save time, you need tools to automate or make each of these activities more efficient.

• finding, curating/pinning content
• creating appealing content
• reaching your target audience, and getting them to follow you
• organic user-generated content from your blog/website, for traffic and shares

Tools for Scheduling, Discovery/Curation and Pinning

Tailwind

Buffer does a lot for scheduling posts and analytics for almost all social media platforms, including Pinterest, but Tailwind is THE #1 Pinterest tool

It covers pretty much everything, from discovery, creation, pinning, to analytics for optimal audience reach and engagement. The following are just a few of its features. It’s not free, but starting at $15 a month for unlimited scheduling and basic insights, it’s definitely worth it.

• Install the extension and you can pin images handily from any website, by drag and drop, or clicking the extensions.
• Sync with Instagram for seamless cross-posting.
• Integrate with Canva, where you can easily create/edit images for pinning.
• Get insight on the performance of boards and pins through Virality and Engagement scores.
• Get insight on the best times to post pins, trending pins, the most active repinners, and influential followers.

ViralTag

This tool is always on the best lists for Pinterest management. Most of us really just pin images rather than create them (perfectly fine, with attribution, of course!)–and ViralTag makes that easy.

With ViralTag as a bookmarklet on your browser, simply click it. All the images in the webpage you’re on are collected into a box. Add the necessary details, schedule for Pinterest and that’s it! Everything is in queue.

Check out these wonderful features:

• ViralTag imports feeds– Instagram, We Heart It, any other image-centric networks for inspiration and curation.
• You can select multiple images from your feeds and bulk-schedule them to Pinterest!
• Organized integration with image sources, Dropbox, Picasa, Canva, and more.
• Analytics, including trending content you might want to repin 

Sendible

Sendible is another heavyweight for social media management.

Not cheap, but you can connect up to 15 social media accounts, RSS feeds included, so you can share from that feed directly to your Pinterest– among other platforms.

Hootsuite

So far, I’ve always simply lumped Buffer and Hootsuite together as the essentials in Social Media Management, you truly need them. But, Hootsuite gets a special mention in this post because of its Pinterest functionalities.

• A dashboard so you can have a Pinterest ‘stream’
• A visual calendar of your queue and existing pins
• Integration with Tailwind and ViralTag! 

Pinterest Tab

A handy Chrome extension that selects a high-quality images from Pinners and shows it when you open a new tab. You can repin it, schedule it, AND choose from which niches you want to see next. Great for discovery!

Pin Search

Another Chrome extension, this one adds to your Pinterest powers by giving you ‘search’ abilities for the exact same content, and everything related to it, so that even if you simply repin, you can be posting better information along with it!

Tools for Creating Pins

Check out this infographic for the best Pinterest stats on what images to create, remember, they should be bright!

Stencil – Formerly ShareAsImage, formely Pin A Quote. Stencil has expanded to social media management, too.

Snappa, Canva, Pablo, PicMonkey – All for simple and quick image creation, without Photoshop skills.

Pixlr for editing and sprucing up. You don’t want to post shabby photos.

Piktochart True to its name, helps you make a chart or infographic quick and headache-free.

Tools for Audience Reach and Targeting
 

Many of the above tools already have audience analytics integrated (you may have to buy into those features) along with insight on influential Pinners and Followers.

PinGroupie takes you closer to your target audience by helping you find Group Boards. Group Boards are boards with with several contributors. Get accepted as a contributor and that’s akin to instantly gaining 1000 followers, or however many are currently following that board!
Use PinGroupie to search for groups in your niche.

Tools for User-Generated Pins and Shares

Let’s not forget working Pinterest away from Pinterest– that is, at your blog and website.

DIGG DIGG and SumoMe Image Sharer: Fool-proof tools that can make your blog lazy-proof. All your readers need to do is click on any of the social share buttons to pin your images. Also useful because you’d be able to keep track of your pins, since PinAlerts is still down for a revamp.

With the above tools, you’d zoom through your allotted time for Pinterest management without sacrificing much. Streamline your Pinterest schedule further by allotting a day for every activity: scheduling, creations, and outreach (following, repinning, commenting).

Which of these tools do you already use? How active are you on Pinterest currently? 

Please share your thoughts in the comments!