If you are trying to promote your blog, the first thing we would do is to start sharing our content with social media. Because we know that social media can send so much traffic to our blog, it is proven to be one of the easy way to gain more popularity quickly.
Today we even have many social networks, each have its type of audience.
Based on the above stats (to see the full report visit quicksprout), you can see Pinterest is a gold mine for food bloggers. With 57% of Pinterest users talking about food related stuff on this social media platform.
How does Pinterest work for food bloggers?
Using Pinterest to promote your content is little tricky. It takes much effort and patience before people discover your post and share your content. You need to spend a lot of time to learn and promote your content in Pinterest.
I did some research, and this is what I found that would help to boost my content in Pinterest.
In order to do an effective promotion, follow these steps.
1) Create multiple boards between 15-20 boards, a combination of boards related to your niche.
2) Create one board just to share your blog content.
3) Follow, comment and re-pin others posts to your general boards based on the appropriate category.
4) Join other group boards related to your niche and start pining in their boards.
Pining strategies.
Once you have started pinning, the following techniques will help you promote efficiently.
1) Multiple Pictures, linking to one blog post – Create more pins to the same blog post and post it at different intervals, to spread your post even further.
2) Comment on your repins – When someone repins your pin, try to start a conversation and build a relationship with the pinner.
3) Pin multiple times in various boards – With too many interactions your pins could get lost. So pinning multiple times, at different intervals will help to boost your pins.
These are some basic techniques, for more advanced Pinterest marketing techniques, read this post from SocialMediaExaminer.
Social Media Management Tools.
For food blogger like me, creating those awesome recipes id more important. And I cannot be spending my whole day working on Pinterest.
Fortunately, there are many social management tools out there which can help to automate this process. So I don’t have to spend much time promoting in social media. These are called social media management tools.
These Social Media tools help you to
1) To connect to all your social media platform from a single dashboard.
2) You can share your content to multiple social media platforms with one click.
3) Schedule your post in advance, so it can post it in social media during the best time slot.
4) Track your social activities and plan your promotion effort based on that.
5) Discover others content and share them with your followers.
Exactly this is what I need to promote my content efficiently, instead of going through multiple social accounts and tracking the progress in each of them.
ViralTag vs. Tailwind.
Even though there are many options out there, I picked 2 of them solely because only these are popular in supporting automated post to Pinterest.
Features of ViralTag:
1) Multiple posts – You can do a bulk upload once and schedule the post across various boards. You can also clone the same post to post in different intervals.
2) Multiple Social Networks- It supports Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn.
3) You can discover others posts within the app and share it with your followers.
4) Integration with Instagram, RSS, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Google and Canva to directly access the images from these networks.
5) Browser extensions to easily share images from other sources.
Features of Tailwind:
1) Multiple posts – You can do a bulk upload once and schedule each post across various boards. You can let the system pick a best time to post your pin.
2) Analytics – Tailwind has much analytics features, and it can even help you to post automatically based on your Pinterest account activities. It also includes features like finding the best time to post, monitoring your pining activities, inspecting the pins for better optimization and many more features.
3) Integration with Instagram and Canva to directly access the images from these networks.
4) Browser extensions to easily share images from other sources.
How about HootSuite or buffer?
Hootsuite and buffer are the leaders in this space. Although they are advanced and have more features, they still don’t have Pinterest integration. Moreover, you quickly see that they are more focused on b2b business and blogs, which might not be a great fit for promoting food blogs.
I choose ViralTag.
After all the evaluation and debate, I choose ViralTag.
The following are the reasons to choose ViralTag.
1) More social media integrations, I can post to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr along with Pinterest.
2) I can schedule the pins way in advance to re-pin multiple times at different intervals.
3) Analytics was a big deal with a tailwind, which can help to boost my Pinterest promotions. This feature probably could come in handy when my profile grows. For the time being, I see Pinterest analytics for business provides a lot of those analytics already, which looks promising.
What can make ViralTag even better?
Although ViralTag has most of the features I wanted, I wish ViralTag could add these features too.
1) Google+ integration – This is another popular social media, where I spend much time every day. As of today, ViralTag does not have integrations to G+. So this would be a great add on to this fantastic tool.
2) Cost – While most of the social media management tools compete at 10$ range per month, ViralTag $29 pricing is little aggressive. Especially for beginners, this is a huge barrier.
3) Analytics – Most of the social media tools have analytics built in, ViralTag could integrate some advance analytics. This could help me see all the statistics in one place.
4) Scheduler Dashboard – It would be great if they have a calendar view of the post that are scheduled.
Overall ViralTag is an excellent tool for food bloggers, to start building a social presence. As of now ViralTag looks promising, and I am positive that it will be a great add-on for us to help grow our social media promotion.
Use this ViralTag link if you want to start using ViralTag, so you will get 15$ credit.