Some automation tools are designed to work with all the major social media services, but BoardBooster is designed to automate posting to just one. Pinterest. It is cheap and has some unique features.
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What does BoardBooster do?
Most social media automation tools support multiple social media services. They aim to be a one-stop-shop for everything you need. BoardBooster does not. It works with Pinterest and that’s it.
It has some brilliant and unique features and for this reason, many people use BoardBooster in addition to another social media automation service.
There are lots of great features in BoardBooster, but there are three main ones and it supports scheduling, looping and campaigns. In this introduction to the service, we will look exclusively at scheduling. (There will be follow-up articles looking at the other two.)
Scheduling enables you to:
- Create and store lots of pins
- Automatically pin them at times/dates you select
Pins can be scheduled once or twice a week to more than 100 a day. BoardBooster is very flexible and it is up to you how often the pins are posted.
How much does BoardBooster cost?
BoardBooster is not free, although it does offer a free trial with no requirement to enter payment details. It is therefore risk-free. It allows you to post 100 pins to Pinterest boards and all features are working.
After using up all your free pins you can choose to add payment details and continue to use the service. BoardBooster charges for a number of pins each month. It costs $5 a month for 500 pins a month, up to $50 a month for 5,000, with several options in between.
Most Pinterest experts say you should pin at least 30 pins a day, so this would come to just over 900 pins a month and 1000 pins is $10 a month.
How does scheduling work?
With every other social media automation service, you log in to the service, create posts and schedule them to be shared at whatever time and day you choose. Pinterest is different. You might find it confusing at first sight, so let’s take a look at how it works. It is really quite simple.
Pinterest allows you to create secret boards. When you are creating a new board there is an option to make it secret. This means that it is private. You can see it and you can post to it, but the public cannot see it or see what pins it contains.
BoardBooster scans your account and for every board it finds, it create a secret board with the same name, except it begins with a dash.
So if you have boards called:
Veg Recipes
Meat Recipes
BoardBooster would create secret boards called:
-Veg Recipes
-Meat Recipes
Instead of posting pins to your normal Pinterest boards, you post them to the secret boards. BoardBooster automatically moves pins from the secret boards to the public boards according to the schedule you create. This makes them visible to the public.
BoardBooster can move one pin a day or 100 pins, it is up to you. Your task is to keep the secret boards topped up with pins. When there are no pins left in a secret board, BoardBooster waits until you add more.
You can post to the normal boards if you want, but if you want to schedule it using BoardBooster, then put the pin in the secret board.
At any time you can log into your Pinterest account and view the secret boards to see how many pins they contain or if they are empty.
Some people spend one day a week filling their secret boards with pins, and then leave it to BoardBooster to pin them over the following days or weeks. It is a great time saver.
Unlike other services, BoardBooster is set-and-forget. Once set up, it runs automatically and you might not need to visit the BoardBooster site again!
1 Create a free BoardBooster account
Go to the BoardBooster website (boardbooster.com) and click the green button in the middle of the page, sign up for free trial. You can add 100 pins on Pinterest for free and how you do this is up to you. It could be 10 pins a day for 10 days, 5 pins a day for 20 days and so on.
If you have not yet signed up for Boardbooster, use my affiliate link BoardBooster.com/invite/CGSMW
You are not charged anything and you don’t need to add any payment details when signing up.
The signup form requires your name and email address, a password for your BoardBooster account, and your Pinterest username.
Go to your profile at Pinterest and look at the URL. Your username is the bit that follows pinterest.com/. My username is rawinfopages and you can see me at www.pinterest.com/rawinfopages/ so I would enter rawinfopages. You need to enter your username.
You will need to authorise BoardBooster to access your account. This is normal and it is so it can your post pins.
2 Add Pinterest boards
The first time you use BoardBooster and whenever you create new Pinterest boards, you must add them.
Click Pinning Tools in the menu bar at the top and then select Scheduler.
Click the Add boards button in the top right corner.
You may see a message like this. Click Refresh Boards and BoardBooster fetches a list of your Pinterest boards. (Do this whenever you add new boards that BoardBooster doesn’t know about.)
BoardBooster has found and listed two new boards. Tick the boxes to indicate that you want to add them and click Continue.
3 Schedule your pins
The scheduler appears so that you can choose when to post pins. At the top, choose between Multiple pins and One or less pins per day. The default 3 pins, but this can be changed.
Pins are automatically posted between the times shown below. Set the start and end times according to when your followers are likely to be using Pinterest. For example, don’t pin them when they are in bed asleep!
This might seem to be an obvious thing, but you might be in a different time zone to your majority of your site visitors, so bear this in mind.
There are Basic and Advanced views. Here is the advanced view and it lets you set different schedules for weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays. You don’t have to use this, but it is there if you need it.
You could focus on one or two boards and build them up with multiple pins per day. However, there is an option for One or less pins per day. You can post every day, every two days and so on. It’s your choice.
I use this setting with one pin per day for every board. I have half a dozen boards, so I post half a dozen pins each day using the One or less pins per day option.
4 View your board list
The screen you return to lists all your boards and there is an information bar at the bottom of each one. This shows how many pins in how many days on the left and the number of followers the board has on the right. The repins is in the middle. My own setting is 1 in 1 days, but yours might be different.
5 View and modify a board
Click a board and an information screen opens. It shows a list of recent pins and in the top left corner is the status information. It shows the board, the pinning frequency, time, and status. This one ran out of pins two days ago!
Click the gear icon if you want to change the schedule.
6 How to schedule a pin
BoardBooster is now set up to pin to boards on a schedule, so how do you actually use it? It is very easy in fact.
You do not create pins in BoardBooster, you create them in Pinterest on the web, on your phone, wherever you normally pin.
If you have a board called Recipes, BoardBooster creates a secret private board only you can see called -Recipes. A dash before the name means it is secret.
Post your pins to the secret boards, not the real ones.
When you add a pin and you get to the bit that asks which board you want to pin to, select one of the ones that begin with a dash.
These are your secret BoardBooster boards. Pins that are added to these are automatically posted by BoardBooster according to the schedule you set.
That just about covers the basics of scheduling pins using BoardBooster. There are many more features, but those will be covered in a different article.
Action Points
- Create a free BoardBooster account
- Add your Pinterest boards
- Let BoardBooster create secret boards
- Set the pinning schedule
- Forget BoardBooster and now just pin as usual
Online Course: Automate social media sharing and updates
2 Automate social media with Buffer
3 Automate social media with Hootsuite
4 Automate social media with Recurpost
5 Automate Pinterest using BoardBooster
