Pinterest Strategy: Batching for Consistency

It’s no secret—lots of great bloggers utilize batching to maximize their time and efficiency!  The idea is to group tasks together—focusing your energy on one specific job.  For example, some people write out all their blog posts for a month (or more): they batch the writing into a block of time.  Then they spend another block of time collecting images, another block for creating pins and graphics, and finally, another block of time for doing all the SEO items.  Truth be told—I haven’t gotten there yet with most of my blogging tasks!  But I’ve found the only way for me to maintain consistency on Pinterest is to batch!  So let’s talk about using batching as a Pinterest strategy to maintain and grow your Pinterest views (and ultimately blog pageviews)!

My Strategy

In a nutshell—I utilize Tailwind!  As I’m sure you’ve discovered, everyone has a slightly different approach to Pinterest—and I LOVE learning what strategies other bloggers are using successfully!  Here’s what I’m doing right now (of course Pinterest is a bit of a moving target…)

*I discovered Chrome is a great browser for using Tailwind!  I’m usually a Safari girl…but Chrome works much better (IMO) with Tailwind!!!

Create Board Lists

Okay…so once upon a time I loved Board Booster (which doesn’t exist anymore)—and losing it caused a real crash in my Pinterest views!  I used it for looping my pins to group boards.  Tailwind is currently creating a way to loop pins—but it’s not widely available yet.  

So I started creating board lists (find this tab under Publisher in Tailwind). 

I mostly blog about homeschooling or mom topics…and 99% of my group boards fall in these categories.  I don’t belong to a huge amount of group boards, but I do belong to about 26 where I can post general homeschool pins.  I also belong to about 20 group boards that are good places for general “mom,” pins.  

So I created 26 Homeschool Board Lists: Homeschool 1, Homeschool 2, Homeschool 3, etc…

And I created 20 Mom Board Lists:  Mom 1, Mom 2, Mom 3, etc…

How to Create Board Lists for Looping

To do this I wrote down a list of all 26 homeschool group boards and another list of all 20 mom group boards I wanted to include on my Tailwind Board Lists.  On these lists I also included my own personal boards that I wanted to repin my content to (my Homeschool board and my Parenting board).

For example, let’s call my Pinterest group boards: homeschool group board A, homeschool group board B, homeschool group board C, etc…

My list looked like this:

1) Homeschool group board A

2) Homeschool group board B

3) …group board C

4) …group board D

All 26 Pinterest Boards I wanted included were written on my list.  From here I created my Homeschool Board Lists on Tailwind:

Homeschool 1: I just typed the list of 26 group/personal boards I had written down.

Homeschool 2: I typed the list, but this time—the first board rotated to the bottom of the list.  So the number 2 board, was now at the top of the list.

Here’s a small visual of my Tailwind Board Lists (remember I did it with a rotation of 26 boards):

Homeschool 1:

• Group Board A
• Group Board B
• Group Board C
• Group Board D

Homeschool 2:

• Group Board B
• Group Board C
• Group Board D
• Group Board A

Homeschool 3:

• Group Board C
• Group Board D
• Group Board A
• Group Board B

**Basically the top board, gets moved to the bottom for the next list!

I did this same thing for my 20 Mom Board Lists: 

Mom 1:

• Group Board A
• Group Board B
• Group Board C
• Group Board D

Mom 2:

• Group Board B
• Group Board C
• Group Board D
• Group Board A

Mom 3:

• Group Board C
• Group Board D
• Group Board A
• Group Board B

The creation of these Tailwind Board Lists took me a few hours—but once it’s done, you never have to do it again!  It has saved me so much time in the long run and kept my boards full!  

Add Pins to Board Lists

Once the board lists are created, you’re ready to add pins to your schedule!  This is something that I do (ideally) every 20 days for the Mom Board List pins and 26 days for my Homeschool Board List pins.  The goal is to never have your queue empty!!  

Some people make more or less board lists depending on how many group boards you belong to—or how often you want to be “refilling,” your queue.

To add pins to my board lists:

-I go to my personal blog board (where I keep all my blog pins).  From here I scroll down the entire page and then hit the tailwind icon in the right corner of my Chrome browser.

-Choose 26 pins that I want repinned to the Homeschool Board Lists.

-For each individual pin, I add the name of one of the Homeschool Boards Lists (which actually will list all 26 boards I want it pinned to).  

–Choose interval scheduling!!

-Put the interval at 1 day, and I personally choose open time slots (I have 50 time slots per day on my pinning schedule—this is just a matter of preference). 

So for the first pin, I type in the board name: Homeschool 1.  For the second pin, I type in the board name: Homeschool 2…and so it goes until I’ve gotten to the last pin, which should be Homeschool 26.

Each of the 26 pins I chose will get pinned to each of the my group/personal boards one time over the course of the 26 days.  Each day a different pin is going to 26 different boards.

I do the same thing for my “mom,” pins…In total it takes about an hour to get 1,076 pins scheduled for the next 20-26 days!

More Pinterest Batching

Once a week I like to spend 1-2 hours pinning from my Tailwind Tribes—adding other tribe members’ content to my Tailwind schedule.  Mostly I put these on my personal boards, but sometimes I put them on applicable group boards.  I also add my own content  (about 3 pins at a time) into all relevant tribes.  

Daily I spend about 10 minutes in the morning, afternoon, and/or evening pinning manually from Facebook groups with Pinterest sharing threads or from my personal Pinterest feed.

**Any of my new posts/pins get put into Tailwind Tribes and put onto applicable boards with interval scheduling (I use about 5 hours between pins and choose optimized).

Happy Pinning

Pinterest is time consuming—but worth it!  And using blocks of time to batch out various Pinterest tasks has helped me immensely!  I truly believe consistency is key on Pinterest—Tailwind makes that possible for me!