36. Let’s Pay Less: Do I Need to Pay for Tailwind?

Stephanie 0:00

With everything on your plate as a teacher business owner, you've likely been tempted to open your wallet for time saving tools, especially where Pinterest is concerned. But do you really need to pay for a Pinterest scheduler like Tailwind? Let's chat about it.

Stephanie 0:16

Hey there, teacher business owner, it's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:28

Welcome back to the podcast. It's been a great month talking about how to fall in love with using Pinterest again. I hope you've been able to glean some helpful tips along the way, and you're feeling a little better about marketing on Pinterest. It's the last week of the month, so it's time for another installment of the Let's Pay Less series. If you're new to the podcast, this series is a chance for us to look at popular budget busters in the online marketing space. I don't give a recommendation one way or the other, because only you know the ins and outs of your business budget. Instead, we look at the pros and cons, so you can make the best decision about how to spend your dollar bills. This week's episode actually goes hand in hand with what we've been talking about all month. One way that people try to save time on their Pinterest marketing and avoid burnout is to use a third party scheduler like Tailwind. Since I've only ever use Tailwind, that's what I'll be referencing throughout the episode. Just know that the pros and cons can likely apply to most third party schedulers.

Stephanie 1:30

So if you're not familiar with Tailwind, it's a third party app that allows you to schedule your pins to your Pinterest account in advance. Back when I started blogging, Tailwind was the only scheduler that had been approved by Pinterest. This was also back in the glory days when the way to win on Pinterest was to create really complicated schedules that cycled each new pin through a whole bunch of different boards, and the regular scheduler on Pinterest, it just couldn't keep up with the way we were all pinning. And so Tailwind was an absolute necessity if you were a blogger. And then there were other features too, like the Tailwind communities. And so what those were, they were like kind of this staging area where people would share their latest pins, and then other members of the community would look through those pins, and they would select some to share to their own Pinterest boards. And you had to have the right ratio of pins that you've added to the community versus pins that you shared from the community. It was a whole thing. Anyway, it was really effective back then, because you really could get your pins in front of fresh eyeballs, because back then, followers would actually see the all of the latest pinning activity for the people they followed.

Stephanie 2:55

And so it was a really great feature of Tailwind, and another reason why a lot of people liked using that scheduler. But as the Pinterest algorithm adjusted, Tailwind became less essential. Pinterest began aggregating pins. So it didn't matter if you shared your pin to 10 different boards, Pinterest would treat it as one pin. Then also, since followers were no longer seeing the most recent pinning activity of the accounts they followed, that made the community aspect less effective as well. But there are still features that make tailwind an attractive option for people who are looking to save time. And so let's chat about the pros and cons of paying for tailwind in 2025.

Stephanie 3:42

The first pro of Tailwind is that it can handle a lot of pins, and you can schedule far in advance. So that means, in theory, you could spend a couple of days and get your entire year of Pinterest content added to a queue, and you would just have to add a few pins here and there when you wrote fresh blog posts. Then this feature is also really helpful if you're wanting to take a vacation. You can make sure that your Pinterest account doesn't go stagnant while you're away. Or if you don't want to think about Pinterest all summer while your kids are home, whatever it is, but Tailwind is able to handle a massive amount of pins in the queue. The Pinterest scheduler can't do that. It only allows you to schedule 30 days in advance. It used to be 14 days, and so that was really tough for taking time off. And one reason why a lot of people still turned to Tailwind. Another pro of this scheduler, and it's something I miss a lot, is that you can schedule pins for posts before they go live. And you might be wondering why that's helpful. So if you have a workflow where you write your blog post and for some reason you don't want it to go live that day, that's a discussion for another day. It really doesn't matter to Google what day you post it, but for people that really want to keep a consistent blog post schedule, so every Saturday, or whatever it is, they schedule their post to go live in the future. And then, let's say they wanted to also get their pins out of the way and in their queue so they didn't have to think about that either. Pinterest doesn't allow you to do that. You can only schedule pins for posts that are already live. But with Tailwind, you could go ahead and schedule the pin and it would go live at the appropriate time in the future, after the post had been published. So it was just a really good feature for people who are fans of batching their content in advance. And then finally, like I mentioned before, Tailwind has a lot of other features. They have social media scheduling, you know, for Instagram or Facebook. They have a pin design platform. I've never tried it, but they have it. They have, you know, AI assistance built in now, and a whole lot of other things. In fact, when I was looking up the current cost of Tailwind for this episode, I noticed that there was something about email subscribers, so maybe that's another interesting feature they have. So when you pay for Tailwind, you do have access to other tools and features.

Stephanie 6:23

Now it's time to discuss some of the cons of paying for Tailwind. So as always, let's start with the cost. They do have a free plan, but you can only schedule five posts per month, and I assume a pin is a post. If you're only scheduling five pins per month, you can easily do that manually, through Pinterest. Then moving on to their paid plans. Their lowest tier is 14.99 a month, if you pay for the full year upfront, otherwise, it's 24.99 a month. And if you plan to schedule more than seven pins a day, that tier wouldn't be enough, because it only covers 200 pins a month. So then you might need the next tier, which would be 24.99 a month on an annual plan, or 49.99 if you paid month to month. And fun fact, that was the tier that I paid for when I used Tailwind, but I definitely got the annual plan. Another con of using Tailwind is that there really is a zero cost alternative, and that's the Pinterest scheduler. It really has come a long way, and it even has launched a drafts feature. And so that does help if you want to create a pin before the post goes live, like I was talking about earlier. You can load everything up, get the graphic, the title, the description, you can even paste the URL there and save it so that all you have to do when the post goes live is go in and hit publish. You still have to revisit it later, but you're able to at least get the bulk of the work done up front. So anyway, my point is that if you're anything like me, it can be hard to pay for something when there is a pretty good alternative for free. And then the final con of using Tailwind is that they work really hard to rope you into an annual plan. I mean, just look at that one tier that I shared with you. It, I think that's one of their most popular ones. It's double if you choose to pay month to month. And I don't know, I just think that's pretty wild. And I'm also just going to quickly mention that there has been some anecdotal evidence that pins scheduled with tailwind don't get the same reach as pins scheduled on Pinterest. But then there's people that say it's impossible for that to happen algorithmically. So I don't know. I won't dive into that debate in this episode, but I just wanted to mention it as a possible con, because that's what people are mentioning out in the world, and a lot of the people in the discussion are much smarter than I am, so I will defer to them if that's something you want to look into.

Stephanie 9:06

But overall, Tailwind can be a really helpful tool if you want to batch a lot of pins over a long period of time and well into the future. If you have a more modest pinning schedule, chances are that the Pinterest scheduler would meet your needs just fine, and it's free. So as always, the choice is yours. But I hope this episode has given you some food for thought.

Stephanie 9:30

I have good news, if you're a student of bring your own traffic. I walk you through some tips and tricks for using the free Pinterest scheduler in lesson 4.4 of the course. If you're not a student of BYOT yet, you can get started at stephanieroyer.podia.com and you can also find the link in the show notes.

Stephanie 9:56

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.