How to Use Tailwind SmartLoop to Simplify Pinterest Marketing

Whether you’re mourning the loss of Board Booster or simply want to free up your time to focus on other areas of your business besides Pinterest, Tailwind’s latest asset SmartLoop is a HUGE blogging time saver.

The SmartLoop feature makes it easier to reshare your Pinterest pins by repeating or looping your best content continuously for you. Because Tailwind technology shares your content at the time your readers are most likely to see it, this helps increase engagement to your pins.

While I LOVE Pinterest and it’s a total powerhouse for helping people get tons of blog traffic, it can get a little time consuming.

I don’t want to spend countless hours with manual pinning or thinking about Pinterest strategy. While I was ok investing more time on Pinterest to learn the ropes and get it working for my business, there’s just so many other areas that need work too:

• Improving SEO
• Improving social media reach on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
• Improving affiliate conversions
• Creating new monetization options

There’s only so many hours in the day, so for me, Tailwind’s SmartLoop is the perfect solution since it frees me up to focus on the other areas my online business needs.

I just want to “get in and get out” as quickly as possible on Pinterest with minimal time, effort and even better when no spreadsheets are required.

That’s where Tailwind’s SmartLoop comes in! Whether you’re already a Tailwind fan or are looking for a Board Booster replacement, Tailwind SmartLoop is here to help.

 Getting Started

If you haven’t yet started with Tailwind, you can get their popular Pinterest scheduling tool one month for free (or your first 100 pins) with my special link.

And if you don’t yet have Tailwind SmartLoop, make sure to get on the waiting list as soon as possible! SL is technically still in beta and Tailwind is slowly adding more users as they’re able to.

Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve most people will have access by the end of October 2018!

SmartLoop Plans

If you’re already signed up for Tailwind’s scheduler, you get access to 250 pin loops for free! This means you’re able to try out SmartLoop before investing additional money, which is pretty cool.

Here are the current plan prices as of Oct. 2018, for our main blog, Hairs Out of Place, I currently have the SmartLoop Unlimited, whereas for my newer niche specific blog, I have the smallest plan, which is the SmartLoop Max. The prices shown are paid annually.

If you’re questioning whether you want to spend the money in addition to the Tailwind scheduling and Tailwind Tribes plans you already have (as I did too), think about how much your TIME is worth?

Tailwind pricing changes based on when you enroll in one of their products, if you’re an early beta user you get the best pricing since you’re helping to work out the kinks and provide feedback to the developers. Later beta adopters (like my 2^nd blog), still get a discounted 50% off rate and once SmartLoop is out of beta, pricing will probably be the full cost.

What Counts As A SmartLoop Post?

 Included with your Tailwind scheduling plan you can give SmartLoop a try since they give you 250 SL posts for free. But what exactly does that mean?

1 SmartLoop pin = 1 pin to 1 of your boards

This means, if you have 25 pins and loop them to 10 of your boards, you’ve reached your 250 SmartLoop free limit.

IF you delete a pin from a loop, this opens up more pins you can add to your loops!

You’re In!!!

Once you’re accepted to SmartLoop, you’ll see SL added to your Tailwind dashboard.

From the SmartLoop tab you can set up your first loop!

If you DO have SmartLoop access and aren’t sure where to start, I’ll walk you through the basics. Tailwind itself has also created MANY video tutorials to help users too!

Setting Up Your First Loop

To get started in setting up your first loop, you’ll need to:

 

1. Choose a loop type
2. Create a new loop – establish loop name and group boards and personal boards you want to be included
3. Add pins from Pinterest
4. Customize your looping schedule
5. Adjust advanced settings
6. Setup any new board rules

Select Your Loop Type

This can be either an Evergreen loop of content that works for you all year long or Seasonal content when you’re just trying to target something like holiday content for a short period of time.

Create a new loop

 FYI, this is a made up loop so I could provide screenshots to you, this is not an actual loop I use myself. Meaning, don’t overanalyze the boards or content haha.

Add Pins from Pinterest

Select the source board that contains the pins you want to add to your loop. You can also sort to only show pins from your website and also show your most recent pins or your most popular pins.

Customize your SmartLoop schedule

 SmartLoop lets you customize your pinning schedule by establishing whether a loop is your “core content” or a “niche topic.”

Your core content is your best evergreen content you want looping constantly since it’s a high performer for you.

A niche topic content might be content that still performs well, but you don’t have as many pins or boards for that content so wouldn’t want the system to loop it too often.

In my example, SmartLoop is saying my pins will loop up to 3x per week and take about 3 months to loop through all of my content.

In small print below your loop options, you’ll find “fine-tune your schedule with advanced settings.” I highly recommend you check this out since this is the best place to tweak how often your content gets distributed on SmartLoop.

Board Rules

When you FIRST set up a new loop, it gives you an option to also add board rules. You’ll see this screen right after you customize your loop.

 From the loop overview section, you can select the edit button to get taken to the Board Rules page. You just need to select “add board rules” and then choose the board title, how many times per day, week, or month you want to add pins to a certain group board or personal board.

You can also edit board rules under Loop Overview, as shown below.

Finishing Up

Once both you and Tailwind have decided your loop looks good, you’ll receive a success message on your screen. You’re now ready to set up your other loops!

What about Tailwind Scheduling?

Because SmartLoop prioritizes what’s new, this also means you CAN use SmartLoop as a stand-alone product and don’t need to first schedule content with Tailwind scheduling.

Tailwind scheduling, SmartLoop and Tribes are all independent options within the Tailwind umbrella, but they are all semi-connected to help you do your best with Pinterest marketing.

When I first started using SmartLoop, I’d use Tailwind scheduling for 2 weeks to make sure my content was getting posted to boards every day. After that, my content would get added to SmartLoop.

As the program improved during the beta process, SL now prioritizes your new content and sends your new pins out almost daily! This really simplified things even more because then I could simply add content directly to SmartLoop and let Tailwind do the work for me!

I still use Tailwind scheduling for targeted pinning, and for Tribe re-shares, but otherwise, all of my pins are just within SmartLoop!

I’d love to hear what you think of SmartLoop! Comment below and send us your input! 🙂