Viraltag: Confessions of a Pinterest Addict

Self-confessed and true to form, I’ve taken yet another social network, Pinterest, tucked it under my belt and ran with it. Blame the attention, blame the workaholism, the addiction, blame the need that we all have for a little soap box action, but I’m always on the lookout for a way to connect just a little bit easier with those around me. So give me a social network, show me a little chance that it will help me connect and spread my message, and I’ll be there. Recently, I decided to take my latent and lacking Pinterest account out from the cupboard, shake it off, dust it off, and give it an upgrade. I began actively pinning, creating boards to showcase the aspirations I’ve let sit down and rest, and the things that I just find darn pretty. Think rocks & crystals, house plants of all shapes and sizes, herbology & herbalism, handsome & scantily clad men, x-men, and of course every possible picture of cats & kittens that I could find. So I started pinning the hell out of life again, stuck in a monsoon in Mexico, I went on a rampage, pinning hundreds of pictures a day, moving pins around and creating sub-boards, private boards, and a collaborative Pinterest vegan recipes board that I would share with all of the plant-based bloggers at Vega.

Very quickly, I discovered that I was flooding the stream, pins would be missed by others, and frankly it sort of just felt manic always checking the incoming pins, always checking notifications, and always thinking about the next best board that I would create for myself. I knew that there were a variety of Pinterest Scheduling software platforms out there, but as with everything in the world today, there’s too much choice and too much information. That, and everyone with a home computer seems to know what it takes to make a slick website, write decent marketing copy, and convince you that there platform is the greatest. In reality though, it wasn’t the greatest that I was looking for. Sure, making a living in PR and social media, I’m always on the lookout for software and tools that help me get the best in social media analytics, the tools that make it easiest to demonstrate success, and save me time, but for my personal use I just wanted a tool that could help me to schedule and monitor my Pinterest account, ensure that my Pinterest descriptions were keyword rich, descriptive, and complete, and make this whole Pinterest game a little more enjoyable and easy to manage.

Enter Viraltag – a complete Marketing Platform for Visual Content, a tool that is a complete solution for uploading, sharing, and scheduling visual content to your social media platforms (namely, Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn). As for me, I was just looking for a Pinterest solution, but I found that I also ended up using the Tumblr scheduling features as well as the Twitter photo sharing. I was surprised to find that unlike scheduling photos in the free Hootsuite dashboard, you could schedule photos in Viraltag through Twitter that would show up as actual Twitter images. Tumblr provided an easy way to upload images directly from my computer (I like to save images in folders throughout the day and share on Tumblr once in the evening), and add descriptions. As far as I can tell, Viraltag doesn’t have the ability to add tags to posts yet, but for now I found the ability to schedule and post much more valuable to my time and energy than adding a couple #HotGuys tags to the countless pics I post of men’s fashion and a good looking fellow with his shirt off.

But easy Pinterest Scheduling is really where Viraltag shines. You install the Viraltag bookmarklet in your browser, and you simply click it to pull up a page of all the potential pinnable images on a page or on a Pinterest board.

After that, select all the images that you want to schedule/share and click the next button. This preview page is great because you can also take a quick look at the sizes and the descriptions. These sizes seem to be the preview size (not the actual size of the image that will be shared on Pinterest), but this seems to only be the case when you are repinning directly from a pin board. Another favorite feature is the ability to easily drag and drop images directly from your computer, and schedule. I love doing this with my own images, and images that I’ve collected from bloggers. Simply click the post button on the left of the ViralTag menu, and choose from a variety of ways to share your images, including your Instagram account!

Then from there, you are directed to my favorite page in all of Viraltag. This page will list out all of the images & pins that you are wanting to schedule and allow you to change the descriptions and the links to which the images are sending traffic when clicked. There is also a feature that allows you to bulk edit your images and descriptions – love the idea of this, but there’s nothing worse than seeing a bunch of pins that are unrelated that all have the exact same description. Especially when the description has nothing to do with the actual image itself. I highly recommend that you do your best to describe your images properly, use keywords that will effectively help people find your images, and make sure that images are clicking through to properties that make sense. This isn’t always going to be possible – after all, at its root Pinterest is about sharing images and not getting referral traffic, but to all of us in Social Media and Online Marketing, we know that Pinterest is an incredible tool to help boost these metrics. So if you’re doing things properly, ethically, and creating value, then why not reap the benefits. Just be genuine people! There’s no such thing as a quick fix in the world of SEO and Online Marketing anymore, so use tools that make doing the right thing easier.

After you’ve set all your descriptions, you’re ready to go. From here you can select the interval between pins (in minutes). I’ve tried everything from 1 – 200 minutes with great success. This is fantastic because you can select groups of pins to be pinned at different intervals to make sure that you are always pinning a variety of different themes and image (much better than creating a tidal wave of cat and kitten pins). You can also create certain pockets of time throughout the day and a maximum number of pics that you want to pin, and click the Add to Queue button instead. This is the “auto-schedule” feature, and just inserts pics during those times. Although I didn’t use this option, and probably should have, because otherwise you’re pinning all through the night, I’ll certainly be moving toward this feature in the future.

Lastly, is your dashboard where you can see all your scheduled pins, your recent posts, and any that may have failed. Here is also where you setup your posting schedule to use the “add to queue” feature that I described above.

 

Final Thoughts

All in all, I’m stoked about Viraltag, excited to dive in and start using it more, and pumped to see what they create next. Although it would be wonderful to have some basic analytics integrated into the platform at some point in the future, for what I use it for, as well as many others, it’s simple, effective and exactly what I was looking for from a Pinterest scheduling platform. They also have a robust referral program, a free 7-day trial, and will reward you if you are a blogger and use the 7-day trial to do a review for them.

Sign up here for your free-trial and give it a whirl > Viraltag Pinterest Scheduling Tool

Disclaimer: Viraltag did not pay me to conduct their review. These thoughts and opinions are all my own. Links in this post are affiliate links for Viraltag that reward clients with credits on their account that can be used for membership fees.