Tech Thursday: Scheduling Pins!

Today's Tech Tip is just for bloggers...

I don't know about you, but I am, by nature, a bad pinner! I frequently commit the Pinterest sin of going on evening pin rampages (especially when my husband is watching yet another hunting show!). Most of us start pinning one thing and end up pinning several a hundred things that we see and love before we stop. We want to save them for ourselves and share them with our readers. The problem is that we clog readers feeds with tons of similar pins... I'm told this is annoying.

Well, I have a solution for you... three solutions actually, and one of them is free (for now).

I have recently started scheduling pins of my own blog content. Now I am trying to schedule other pins that I find too, rather than instantly pinning them, so that I don't become THAT pinner who clogs up your feed every night. Here are your Pin scheduling options as far as I know:

1 - ViralTag

They were the original (I think) Pin schedulers. Their service works like a charm, but it comes with a price tag. When I did a free trial with them, it was $29.99 a month, but I have heard that they increased the price to $49.99 now. (ouch!)

*UPDATE* ViralTag obviously heard our collective gasp at their increase to $49.99, and have reduced it back to $29.99 a month. If you sign up for a free trial, before it's over, you'll get a coupon reducing it to $19.99. Since they allow you to connect multiple accounts (up to 10 at this price), the Teaching Trio decided to go with them, and we are very happy!

2 - Tailwind

I've been using Tailwind for their free Pinterest analytics for a while. They just started offering Pin scheduling as a part of their pro package. At $9.99 a month, it's a steal compared to ViralTag. I've heard good things, but I wasn't able to get it to recognize that I had connected my Pinterest account for some reason.

3 - Robovy

Robovy is a new site that works much like ViralTag did. For now, because it's brand new, it's free. They say it will be free forever for those who sign up now. (We'll see!) I was a little skeptical because there are a few grammar errors on their site, but I gave it a shot anyway, because at the time, it was them or $30 a month at ViralTag. So far I've been pleased with their scheduling tool. Like ViralTag, they have a Chrome extension that works just like the Pin It extension, which makes pinning really easy. Because I had security concerns, I changed my Pinterest password before connecting to them so that it's totally random and doesn't match any of my other passwords.

*UPDATE* As I suspected, Robovy is no longer free. They have four pricing levels ranging from $5 to $26 a month. The Teaching Trio would have needed the $18 package, but we had several issues with things not posting correctly, so we have switched to ViralTag.

Scheduling Pins

One kind of weird thing about all of these sites is that they require you to enter the number of minutes between repins. I don't repin the same content more than once a week or more, so I was having to keep calculating out how many minutes are in a week. Lucky for you, I decided to make a handy chart to refer to when I am scheduling my pins. You can grab it free by right clicking the image below and clicking "Save as..." I hope it will help you make sense of when to schedule your pins!

Why bother scheduling pins? Because you can schedule automatic repins of your best blog posts. Because maybe when you have time to pin, your followers aren't browsing Pinterest. (My  most popular time of day is 5-7, and that's our family time, so I'm not pinning then.) Because you're a serial pinner like me and don't want to be annoying. Either way, it gives you the chance to pin good content at the times your followers are online, no matter what you're doing at that time!

Head over to Teaching Trio to see the second post in our PowerPoint Potential series and link up your own technology posts!