A Tailwind App Review: My Verdict

Are you considering using Tailwind App for scheduling your publishing activity in Pinterest and Instagram? I’ve been using it for many months now and have a solid appreciation of the pros and cons. The following post is my Tailwind App review based upon my own experiences of what’s great and what’s not so great about it.

For the skim readers among you, I’ll provide a summary review of Tailwind App to begin with. Afterwards I’ll provide a more detailed review based upon how well I feel it’s done it’s job.

Tailwind App Review Summary

	A slick and effective social media scheduling tool with bags of features.
	At around $10 per month it’s a steal.
	Easy to use scheduling and sharing tools. Communities & SmartLoops are amazing.
	Fast acting and friendly support.

I’ve found Tailwind an extremely useful tool for managing my Pinterest pinning… probably 90% to 95% of all my pins go through it. I won’t comment on how useful it is for Instagram because… well, I’m not able to devote much time to Instagram on top of everything else at the moment!

In terms of Pinterest, Tailwind Communities are a great feature for getting your pins out there, since Community activity is based upon sharing pins for everyone’s benefit. You still have to make your pins pretty, but I see increasing Community repins the longer I’m a member. So far the pins I’ve had go viral have all been because Community members have shared them.

It’s a pretty straightforward system, you can be up and running in a matter of minutes and schedule pins for months in advance, which means you can batch your pinning activity saving you hours of effort.

Tailwind’s FREE trial enables you to schedule up to 100 Pins on Pinterest and 30 posts on Instagram, with no time restriction.

Sign Up for Your FREE Tailwind Trial

The Pinterest Problem

I started using Pinterest for SideGains around October 2019. Like everyone else, I’d heard uber-bloggers talking about how Pinterest can drive massive amounts of traffic within weeks… of course I got hooked on this idea and wanted some of the action.

I’d also heard about Tailwind, but since I started out trying to grow SideGains completely organically I didn’t want to invest in any kind of subscription at that time.

Instead I manually pinned all the images I was creating for SideGains at that time and then repinned from others when I found posts I enjoyed reading.

This was okay for a while, but after a month or so I’d found 3 things that really bothered me:

1. Pinterest’s scheduling limits.
2. Requesting permission to join group boards.
3. Understanding which pins Pinterest likes.

Let me explain.

What is Tailwind?

Tailwind is a very slick social media scheduling tool for Pinterest and Instagram.

Thousands of people rave about it, with many claiming to have experienced massive traffic growth to their blogs, in particular from Pinterest, as a direct result of using Tailwind.

It provides a bunch of super-useful features, but most beneficially for me in terms of Pinterest it:

• Removes the tedious and time-consuming activity of scheduling posts.
• Has an area called Tailwind Communities, which to me is what Group boards should be more like.
• Shows you how many times Pins have been shared.

These 3 things alone persuaded me to sign up to the free Tailwind trial that boasts:

• No credit card set up.
• A 100 Pinterest pin trial.
• A 30 Instagram post trial.
• Access to 5 Tailwind Communities to help get your Pinterest pins shared from the outset.

It’s a pretty decent trial to be honest, since it gives you plenty of time and space to properly use Tailwind to see how it works.

Find out how I use Tailwind in my “sociable” Pinterest marketing strategy.

My Experience of Tailwind App

I’ve mentioned the 3 main reasons I wanted to look for a tool to help me with Pinterest, so I’ll focus on whether or not Tailwind has helped me to solve them.

But before I review this I’ll explain a little about the Tailwind interface.

In the process of setting up your Tailwind trial, you have to connect it to your Pinterest account so it has permission to access your boards. It’s a straightforward set up, effectively requiring you to login to Pinterest through the Tailwind app.

When you’ve connected Tailwind to Pinterest, you’ll see the following navigation options:

You have 4 main areas to explore:

1. Weekly Summary.
2. Communities.
3. Publisher.
4. Insights.

Weekly Summary

This shows you your weekly performance and breaks it down into:

• The number of times your pins have been repinned.
• How many images you’ve pinned that link to pages in your domain.
• The number of new followers you’ve earned.
• All the comments your pins have received.

It’s a really useful dashboard providing a snapshot of the most important engagement signals for your Pinterest account and pins.

Communities

You have to to join Communities in the Tailwind App before you’ll see anything in this area. Tailwind will prompt you to look for and join Communities when you first visit this area.

Communities are like Pinterest Group boards, but unlike Pinterest it’s really easy to find Communities in your niche that you can join immediately. Some others require you to request membership, but there are plenty you can join immediately so you can begin sharing pins.

When you join a Community you’ll see all the members, along with all the pins that any member has ever submitted to the Community. These are pins you can add to you own schedule to mix things up.

The purpose of Tailwind Communities is to amplify the pins you create by making them available for other members to share to their Pinterest boards. The flip-side of that is you MUST share pins from other Community members to your Pinterest boards.

What’s good for you is good for others and vice-versa!

The great thing about every pin submitted to the Community is that you can see how many times each one has been shared, which gives you insight into pin popularity.

Publisher

The Publisher area is your scheduling tool. It’s the place where you set your pinning schedule, draft pins, and when they’re ready, submit them to your queue.

When you’re drafting pins, you provide your pin image a title, description, landing page and a board (or boards) to which you want to add them.

Once you’re happy, you either specify a specific date / time you want to schedule the pin or simply submit it to the next available position in the schedule you’ve set.

Your scheduled pins include all the pins you’ve submitted to it, along with any others you’ve selected from your Communities.

One final thing to note is Tailwind has a feature called SmartLoop, which is a tool for you to either:

• Resubmit your best performing pins to amplify them further.
• Resubmit pins according to seasonality… you might only want to promote some pins at certain times of the year.

Insights

The Insights area tells you everything you’d want to know about your Pinterest activity. It details your Pinterest profile performance showing you:

• How well your boards and pins are doing.
• Which of your pins others are sharing.
• The pins that are performing the best.

You can also configure Tailwind to connect to your Google Analytics account to show you the traffic Pinterest is sending you! This is incredibly useful, since you can directly see the actual pins that drive traffic and understand what it is about them that makes generates more engagement.

The more pins you submit, the more insights you get. Over time this helps you understand what types of pins work well / not so well, the days and times your pins get more engagement and ultimately what tends to drive visitors to your site.

Solving My Pinterest Problems

So I’m going to loop back to my initial reason for trialling Tailwind App for Pinterest:

• Scheduling pins.
• Group boards.
• Insights into pin performance.

I’ll look at each problem sequentially.

Summary

As you can see from the beginning of my Tailwind App review, I’m still using it.

I signed up for the free trial and found it a massive aid in keeping my Pinterest activity bubbling along with way less effort than it takes to manually pin.

I still manually share some pins when I’m browsing Pinterest and I also tend to comment on pins I like directly in Pinterest too. A super-useful feature is you can schedule any pins you find in Pinterest to your Tailwind queue through Tailwind’s browser plugin.

Aside from that, I estimate that Tailwind handles between 90% – 95% of my pinning / repinning activity and my visits from Pinterest are growing.

I’m not getting the deluges of traffic that the uber-bloggers seem to be getting, but this has a lot more to do with figuring out the kind of content that people want rather than the pins I create to promote the sometimes more niche blog topics I write about.

In terms of managing workload, scheduling and insights I’m a very satisfied customer and I won’t be switching anytime soon.

Tailwind SmartGuide: Protection for Your Pinterest Account

I should touch one other extremely useful tool that Tailwind provides. It’s a monitoring function called Tailwind SmartGuide.

SmartGuide is designed to improve your Pinterest marketing results by recommending best practices, such as pinning times. However it also includes a feature that understands Pinterest best practices around Pin volumes.

As many people know, Pinterest has an itchy trigger finger when it comes to what it perceives as spam. I speak from experience here as my Pinterest account was suspended for spam, when I’d never done anything even remotely spammy.

One of the reasons Pinterest will suspend your account is if you are pinning too actively. Tailwind SmartGuide helps out in a big way here:

• It monitors your pinning frequency and warns you if your activity likely to reduce your overall reach or put your Pinterest account at risk of suspension.
• It suggest simple fixes to keep your Pin schedule healthy.

Tailwind SmartGuide can save you a lot of pain… take it from me!

A basic level Tailwind account for Pinterest comes in at around $10 a month. You can sign up for your free Tailwind trial by clicking the banner below.

That’s all for now.

Paul

Any questions about my Tailwind App review? Drop me a comment below and I’ll happily answer!