How to Find Your Best Pinterest Boards To Pin To With Tailwind (Even Without A Paid Account)

(Please note: This post was recently updated for Tailwind best practices for your business in 2020 and I’m an affiliate for Tailwind meaning I earn a small commission at no cost to you if you use my links).?

What if you could find the best Pinterest boards to use for more eyeballs on your content?

Well, you can!

The whole process will take a bit of work, but after you’re finished and start seeing your results, you’ll be glad you did it.

Things you need to know first

You’re likely here because you started a blog (If you haven’t yet, start one! Here’s how) and you know Pinterest can be a big traffic driver for your business. 

Okay, after you started you blog, next is quality content. Quality content, along with quality pins that lead to that conetn, are crucial to see any success with Pinterest. 

Finding your best Pinterest boards will be useless if your pins aren’t clickable and if your content isn’t useful and solves a problem.

And last, there have been MASSIVE updates to the Pinterest algorithm especially last year leading into this year (yayy for 2020 and how crazy it’s been so far!).

This means THERE IS NO LONGER A FOCUS ON GROUP BOARDS. Pinterest has seriously taken away any traffic power they once had.

Pinterest now wants you to build your own personal boards on your account, with quality pins and work those (Tailwind is perfect for that!).

If you’ve read everything above and you’re ready to get started with Tailwind, you can go ahead and start looking at which of your boards are the best performers and which you should be pinning to.

For the process to work for you, you need to be signed up for Tailwind ( the most awesome pinning software out there, period!)

Sign up for Tailwind HERE to get started

If you don’t want to sign up for Tailwind or are on a really tight budget, you can still use their free trial (up to 100 scheduled pins) to take a look at which of your boards you should be pinning to the most!

Last I checked, they don’t even ask you for your credit card information and you don’t have to continue using them if you decide you don’t like them (fat chance).

Got your free trial?

Let’s dive on in.

The first step

Log into your Tailwind dashboard.

On the left-hand side, click on Insights > Board Insights

You’ll be met with a dashboard that might seem confusing at first, but really isn’t once you get a few things down.

The Three things we want to pay the most attention to are:

• Virality Score
• Repins
• And Engagement Score

You can click the little triangles under each title to sort from lowest to highest or from highest to lowest depending on what you’re looking for.

If I’m looking to check the amount of followers of each board, I might check the down arrow under followers and then under total. This will then sort the pins according to the criteria where you click on the little triangle icons ( highlighted in yellow below).

You can also filter the board selection so it only shows you data for group boards, secret boards, or regular boards.

The next thing you want to do is make a list of your top ten boards for virality score and then another list of top ten boards for engagement score and then another list for your top ten boards for repins. 

So, for example. To get your top ten boards for virality score, click on the down pointing arrow in the virality column right under ‘virality.’

This will give you the boards in order from greatest virality score to least.

Make sure you write those down and then do the same with the engagement score and repins.

Then, you can cross compare to see which boards have the highest virality, engagement and repins scores to pin to.

These are the boards you’ll want to pay extra attention to (while not neglecting your other boards) and pin your best relevant pins to.

Related: 9 Useful Affiliate Programs for Lifestyle Bloggers To Increase Their Income 

Once you’ve got that list down, you’ve got your ten best performing group boards for the time frame you chose (that can be adjusted on the top right hand corner).

Here are some 2020 Pinterest best practice changes you need to pay attention to

Okay so Tailwind has made it easy to find out which personal boards are working the best for you.

Now what?

Well, these are some of the things the Pinterest algorithm prefers as you move forward with your Pinterest profile:

Pinterest prefers FRESH CONTENT

Remember a year or two back when you’d hop onto Pinterest and you’d see one pin appear over and over…and over again on your feed?

Pinterest doesn’t want to do this anymore. They want to make sure they’re showing their audience brand new and FRESH ideas and content, which as a business, makes total and complete sense that they’d want to move forward like this. No one wants the same old content forever.

What does this mean for you, as a blogger trying to get Pinterest traffic? It means you need to keep creating fresh content to be seen, grow, and get traffic through Pinterest.

What is the definition of FRESH CONTENT on Pinterest?

According to the Tailwind experts (and word on the street ‘cus no one really knows for certain how the Pinterest algo works):

“Fresh content on Pinterest is a new image that has not been shared to Pinterest before. This includes images for new blog posts, new pages, new product listings, and new images for existing posts, products, and pages.”

so this means you want to constantly create fresh, beautiful, and engaging pins that’ll have Pinterest users saving and clicking on them and that’ll have the Pinterest algorithm favoring you and showing you to more of their users. 

Please NOTE THIS

There was once upon a time when Pinterest was the creator of INSTANT success for a lot of blogs you see out today. They’d create a pin, send it out through Tailwind and pin it constantly. Through sheer consistency and luck, they’d hit a home run with one (or many) viral pins to the tune of making thousands of dollars a month within even three months of starting.

This is no more.

It is HARDER to get traffic on Pinterest today than it was even just a year ago. Viral pins that got crazy page views are a thing of the past. Now Pinterest favors LONG TERM cosistency, quality content, and fresh, hot out the oven, pins. 

And here’s where Tailwind can be your trusty Pinterest sidekick with their Smart Guide release. You can get the full run down on it here.

Moral of the story: BE IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL AND BE PATIENT with Pinterest and Pinterest will reward you. It might just take longer than it used to.

This begs the question: How many fresh pins a day should I be adding to Pinterest?

There’s no concrete answer to this. 

The best answer is to play around with it for a few weeks, pay close attention to your traffic and analytics, and see what works for you. Pinterest takes a lot of experimenting to figure out. No one account is the exact same. 

Some pinners are adding one new pin a day (after already having a solid amount of pins they’ve accumulated over time they can circulate through their boards with Tailwind). Other pinners are sticking to adding three to four new pins a week to old content while creating new content and creating pins for those too. Others ten.

It’s your call to make and your question to answer depending on your outcomes. Remember, experiment!

Pay attention to your pinning times

Once you have your list of best Pinterest group boards handy, it’s a good idea to take your top group boards and pin to them when your audience is most active on Pinterest.

For many people that’s around the evenings and late at night.

According to Hubspot, the best times to pin can often be in the evening (5 pm onward), which would make sense since everyone is unwinding from the day, or getting home from work, etc. 

You can set optimal pinning times with Tailwind and have it automatically generate a pinning schedule with the best pinning times that produce that highest engagement according to the history of your account.

To do this, on the left hand dashboard menu, click Publisher > Your Schedule > Recreate Schedule (located to the lest of the schedule times).

Tailwind will let you enter the amount of pins you want it to pin per day, and it has a smart guide feature, which monitors your account to keep it from generating spammy activity that hurts you on Pinterest and that could get your account suspended (we definitely don’t want that). 

Something I honestly love about Tailwind is that while they aren’t perfect, they literally NEVER stop innovating and listening to what their users need. So if you have any suggestions, questions, or concerns, don’t be afraid to reach out to them.

They will HELP. That’s what they’re there for. 🙂

Final Notes

Tailwind can be a huge time saver when it comes to growing your Pinterest profile’s traffic, views, and followers. My blog would not be where it is without it.

Of course, you can always manually pin every single day. But sometimes, ain’t nobody got time for that.

Any Tailwind tips worth sharing? Tell me about them below.