TailWind Review

Detailed Reviews

Tailwind is a marketing, management, and analytics tool for Pinterest and Instagram. This US-based service has an interesting origin story. It involves them starting from finding ways to identify brides-to-be on Pinterest to come up with one of the best management and marketing tool for Pinterest. They are now doing the same for Instagram as well.

Pros

• Systematic scheduler: Tailwind provides the user with a flexible and immensely useful scheduler. Once can easily schedule pins and posts for months in a few hours using the scheduler.
• Board lists: Board lists allow users to create groups of boards on their profiles. This allows one to simultaneously schedule content across all these boards in case there is some suitable content for the board group.
• Tailwind Tribes: Tailwind Tribes allows you to identify other users on Tailwind who belong to the same line of thinking as you. This will bring in more exposure for your content and introduce you to some amazing content from your field of interest as well.
• SmartLoop: SmartLoop lets you repost your content which has let’s say relevance for prolonged durations. You can use this feature to make all your seasonal and evergreen content to repin on your boards.
• Useful scores: Tailwind generates exclusive scores such as virality score and engagement score to gauge the performance of profiles and pins. These scores will help you get a better idea of trends across your profiles.
• Detailed insights: Tailwind provides you a deep enough look at all activities and modifications across various sections of your profiles. They serve all this data in such a way so that it is easy for anyone to understand it without much difficulty. You can then use all this information to create sound strategies for the future.
• Monitoring competitors: Tailwind gives you the ability to monitor the performances of your competitors or profiles you look up to. This valuable insight into the stats of other profiles can be of great help and even inspiring at times.

Cons

• Not so good for Instagram: Tailwind is not the best tool available for Instagram out there. It still lacks a lot of essential features which are of paramount importance if one needs to manage an Instagram profile. Inability to schedule stories and carousels, no options crop or change the aspect ratio of images are some glaring shortcomings.
• Few options to export: Tailwind allows users to export reports and other data only in a CSV file format. They should’ve included more options such as PDF files. Having everything in a CSV format adds those few extra steps which can sometimes be annoying.

Introduction

Tailwind is a social media management tool made specifically for Pinterest and Instagram. They originally started with their services available specifically for Pinterest. But they were so good at it that it did not take them took too long to gain popularity among marketers and promoters on Pinterest.

It has not been long since Instagram was introduced on this platform. A brief look at dashboards available for Pinterest and Instagram should be enough to indicate that Tailwind specializes in the first one.

This review will further shed light on this topic, and you will be able to judge how wide are the differences in features available for the two social platforms.

Most users acknowledge the fact that Tailwind is a good enough management application for Pinterest, but it is the addition of Instagram which has left people wondering if they will get the same kind of service on it.

You will know the answer to this question by the end of this review.

But how good is Tailwind for Pinterest? This question deserves an answer first, and only then any further discussion will make sense.

We will see how easy it is to manage content using this tool. The official website boasts a lot of smart scheduling, and we will make sure to test out this feature to the fullest of its capabilities.

The primary function of a tool like this is to help the user grow and promote the brand on social media. Tailwind proclaims to have capabilities and tools to achieve such goals. The review will include an assessment of this feature of as well.

They have catchy names for some of their features such as Tailwind Tribes and SmartLoop which are supposed to help you grow and stay relevant on platforms. We will go through all such unique and exclusive features and see if they are as good as their names.

Scheduling pins and posts

Creating an account on Tailwind is straightforward and effortless. You can sign-in with either a Pinterest account or an Instagram one. There is also an option to sign up directly for this service as well.

Once you have created an account and integrated relevant profiles with it, you are ready for posting content across your profiles.

However, they will first prompt you to download a browser extension to make it easier to post content.

The process of scheduling and posting content on Pinterest and Instagram are slightly different, and we will focus primarily on Pinterest.

If you have got the Tailwind extension installed on your browser, you will see a Tailwind icon every time you hover the mouse pointer over an image which can go on Pinterest.

All you need to do is click on this image, and it will open up a Tailwind window where you can specify the board on which this image will go. You can choose multiple boards at a time and decide if you want the image to be simultaneously uploaded on them or at some interval.

This feature makes your profile more active with you doing lesser work and averting being monotonous as well. If someone finds an image which may be relevant to eight boards in their profile, then that one image will make for a total of eight pins at the work of just one.

Tailwind automatically identifies best time slots when you should pin something on your profile. You get options to either go with recommendations or create your custom time slot for the application to pin your image.

There is an option to create custom time slots beforehand as well. This way you can smoothly glide through the process of scheduling pins for later.  

All the marketers and promoters on both Pinterest and Instagram realize how tiresome and annoying it can be to manually post content for an active account on either of these platforms. If someone has got multiple such accounts, then manual content posting is bound to take away a good portion of the day.

Tailwind allows you to plan as well as schedule content well in advance which then leaves room for a lot of other productive activities. Since you will not be stressed about posting content anymore, you get a chance to be more creative.

The other way of scheduling content is uploading it on the application. You can upload one or many images as per your liking. Bulk uploading of images is a convenient way to transfer large volumes of content at once.

When you upload an image, it gets saved as a draft into the scheduler. Next, you can specify captions and hashtags, tagging others, adding location, etc. Tailwind will even assist you in some parts like it will suggest different hashtags for your Instagram when you modify the draft.

When you schedule a draft, the item moves to another tab called ‘Scheduled,’ and when it gets published, you will see it in ‘Published’ tab. The nomenclature of tabs couldn’t have been easier to understand.

There are a few subtle and noticeable differences when you schedule content for Pinterest and Instagram. The board dictates one, and other depends a lot upon hashtags. You will get suitable options according to the platform on which you plan to post content.

As we mentioned earlier, Tailwind specializes in Pinterest, but the same cannot be said for Instagram. There are a few limitations to scheduling content for Instagram. You will find it significantly difficult to schedule stories and carousels.

There are no options to edit images or crop them before scheduling them for Instagram. Presence of such features on this application would have made life a lot easier for the user.

Playing with the scheduler

The scheduler on this platform is one of its most impressive features. We feel that users enjoy it the same because of its flexibility and ease of use.

Let’s talk a bit more about this incredibly useful section of this application. There is a slight difference between the schedulers available for Pinterest and Instagram. We will go through the one for Pinterest.

We mentioned in the previous section how Tailwind identifies and creates time slots for you which are supposed to facilitate a faster growth on the platform. It suggests those time slots based on traffic at different times of the day.

However, it is also a possibility that you may end up not liking this schedule or want to make some modifications. You can do so by going to ‘Your Schedule’ tab of ‘Publisher.’

Here you will see various time slots active for your profile on different days of the weak. Those with a dark green background are the ones for when your pin will go live if you add it in the queue.

There may also be a few with a light-green background. These are suggestions for more time slots with a chance of better exposure to your pins. You can click on these to include them in your queue slots.

You can add in new time slots by clicking on relevant buttons against each day of the week. If you want to make some changes or delete an existing slot, then you need to click on it. This will open up a dialog box with all the necessary options.

They provide an option to create a whole new schedule as well. You can click on the ‘Recreate Schedule’ button, define how many times you want to post every day, and it will automatically create a new schedule for you.

You can again make changes in it if you want.

Tailwind allows you to view scheduled post either in a grid form or in a list form. On the right side of the window, you get a visual description of your scheduled posts with their time and days.

Time slots are represented as square boxes and an image inside those boxes which are scheduled to publish content. You can drag and drop images from one box to another if you want to rearrange the schedule.

Custom time slots have a small padlock icon. But you can drag and drop the images inside these slots as well. The padlock icon is to signify that you cannot drop an item from another slot into this slot.

It is also there to signify that item inside this box will remain unaffected if you decide to shuffle queue. The ‘Shuffle queue’ option randomly interchanges items within boxes if you feel the need to shake up things a little.

Tailwind provides you enough options to play around with schedules and slots both before and after you have set up pins for publication.

There are a few advanced features on this application which allow you to be more efficient with schedules and content management. One such feature is the ‘Board List.’ It lets you group together different boards.

Grouping of boards saves time when you have a pin relevant to a lot of boards at once. You can create custom board groups which are all suitable places for certain pins.

Next time you add such a pin in the scheduler, you can choose a board group instead of selecting different boards separately. It will also make sure that you don’t miss any boards.

When you queue a pin under different boards, all the pins will appear together in subsequent time slots. This repetition of pins will not make you look so good on Pinterest. Tailwind offers two ways to deal with this issue.

You can ensure that there is some significant gap between pins on different boards in this case. There is a ‘Use interval’ option which allows you to maintain time gaps ranging from a few hours to a few days.

You can choose to have these pins to go in time slots around that period, create new recommended time slots for these repetitive pins, or create new slots to pin these images at the exact interval you mentioned.

There is another way which we feel is much easier and convenient to use. You can shuffle the queue. Doing so will rearrange scheduled pins, and you won’t have the same pin in subsequent slots anymore.

You must have created a lot of content which deserves pinning more than just once on your board(s). There may be some content which has a seasonal relevance and while there might be some which are simply evergreen and can be repeated throughout the year.

SmartLoop lets you pin such content again and again on your profile so that it can get more exposure. You can use this feature for both your seasonal as well as evergreen content.

You can mention all the specifications such as how often you want it to repeat and when you want it to repeat. It will then be Tailwind’s responsibility to keep pinning this content on your board(s) at specified intervals.

SmartLoop is a feature exclusive to Pinterest only.

There is one feature in scheduler which is exclusive to Instagram and worth mentioning as well. You can get a preview of how your Instagram page will look to others. This helps one make sure that there is nothing out of the theme in the feed.

Tailwind Tribes

If you are regularly pinning content on Pinterest, you must have realized that sometimes it becomes challenging to find fresh and relevant content for your boards. It is not an easy task to keep coming up with good quality relevant content regularly.

A similar situation again arises when you don’t run out of content but run out of avenues to share your content on Pinterest. In this case, you may be putting out great content day in and day out, but it may not be translating into the kind of traffic you inspect.

Tailwind helps its users get out of a rut in both these situations. Tailwind Tribes is a place where you get to find like-minded people. It connects you to people working on the same niche just as you.

It is a place where users can help each other and experience mutual benefits.

Let us try to understand how it works. Tailwind Tribes connects you to people working in areas similar to yours. This will introduce you to a lot of content which can go on your boards. Others in your tribe will come across your content which can go on their boards.

When your tribe members pin your content on their boards, it will make for some quality content on their board and introduce your material to some new audience. This new audience will have the potential to become your audience as well.

Same things will happen when you pin content of one of your tribe members on your board. They will get exposure to a bigger audience, and you will get some quality content for your board.

Both exposure to new audiences as well as the volume of relevant content will increase for you with an increase in the size of the tribe. The rewards increase exponentially for all the tribe members with an increase in size.

Tailwind Tribe, in our opinion, is one of the best features of this tool. It helps users get more popular as well as provides them more content to pin.

Insights and analytics

No management tool is complete without providing reports about performance and growth of a profile. These reports allow users to look beyond likes, repins, shares, retweets, and all other social media metrics.

These reports evaluate your content and profile from a lot of different perspectives and then tell you what is it that you have been doing wrong or right and helps identify areas for improvement.

Tailwinds have also got an insights section which is further divided into a lot of sub-sections. These sub-sections take care of different aspects of profile and help keep things organized.

Let us discuss some of these sections and see how helpful these insights are for users. We used only the trial version of Tailwind. Therefore, some of the data was not available for our profile. However, it posed no significant issues to identify what data would have been available if we had an upgraded version of this application.

The first section in insights is ‘Profile Performance.’ It provides all the essential information related to profiles in one place. It will tell you about pins, repins, comments, increase or decrease in the number of followers, etc.

There will be a timeline graph as well as a bar graph to depict your increase or decrease in followers. You will find a few scores and ratings below these graphs.

There will be virality score, engagement score, and engagement rate. It is simple enough to understand what these scores mean. For instance, virality score implies the number of repins you get per pin.

It can help you know if your content is doing well or not. You will always want this score to go up. You will know how hard you need to work on your content based on your virality score.

The other scores will help you gauge the performance of your profile in a similar manner but based upon different parameters.

‘Board Insights’ is one of the most useful and most appreciated sections of insights on Tailwind. It gives you a report of performances of different boards.

You may be maintaining some of these boards and maybe a part of others. Each board has a significant role to play when it comes to how much attention your content gets on Pinterest.

If you are part of a board which isn’t doing very well and showing no signs of improvement, you may want to detach yourself from it as it is not wise to pin your content on such boards.

‘Board Insights’ will show you different parameters and scores for your boards. You can analyze this data to plan your future strategies. If some board doing well beyond your expectations, then you can take note of it and employ similar tactics for your other boards.

‘Pin Inspector’ will break it down into even smaller pieces for you, and lets you monitor pins individually. This is as microscopic as it can get on Pinterest.

‘Website Trends’ and ‘Organic Activity’ will give you a better look at what people are pinning from your website to Pinterest and what kind of buzz exists around those pins.

Helps you grow

The next sections in insights are available only for subscribers with an enterprise plan. These sections will cater majorly to those who have a bigger brand to manage and a high volume of content to juggle.

Tailwind taps into bigger sources to get this sort of content out for you. But this it is no more about analyzing oneself to improve but analyzing the whole ecosystem and taking advantage of such knowledge.

The kind of data available in these sections will help you immensely to do better on the platform.

It will pull out all the trending pins around your industry and find out which topics will help you attract more traffic. You can plan your future content based on such data to leverage current trends to your benefits.

It not only helps you with the creation of content but helps you with delivering it as well. Tailwind will identify the best days and time when an audience related to your content is most active. This will help your content gain more friction in the least possible time.

If you are wondering what about time slots which are suggested in the scheduler, well, those time slots are based on activity on your profile, while these will be based on activity around your niche of content.

Finally, it compares your data and scores against your competitors. This one on one comparison lets you keep an eye on your rivals and helps you stay in the hunt for as long as possible.

It ensures that you never fall so much behind that it becomes difficult to get back into the race. You can learn from your competitor’s mistake if they make any and avoid getting the experience firsthand.

All this data available under the enterprise plan can be a game changer. It will give all the possible knowledge and statistical guidance you may need to grow your brand on Pinterest.

Notifications and reports

What use is information if you don’t get it when you need it. Timely action is critical on platforms such as Pinterest if you want to keep up with changing trends.

Another essential attribute of information is that it should be easy enough to interpret. You don’t want to be scratching your head wondering what to do with all reports and data lying in front of you.

Tailwind takes care of both of these facets and delivers timely reports which are easy enough to understand for the user.

All the scores, graphs, and charts available in Tailwind Insights make sense to everyone who knows a bit about Pinterest and its fundamentals.

You get the option to export data in CSV file format and use it in various files and reports for yourself. But we also feel that they could have been more generous with file formats available for export.

Pdf and png would have made for great forms for easy sharing.

However, Tailwind has done an impressive job when it comes to customizing notification. You can selectively go through parts which have your interest.

It lets you decide when you want to get notified, what you want to get notified about, and how frequently you want to get notified.

Managing notifications on Tailwind is an extremely easy task. The options available in notification center should be more than enough for anyone to get notified the way they want.

Conclusion

Tailwind is, without a doubt, one of the best management tools for Pinterest. It takes care of each and every minute detail which may affect the performance of one’s profile.

Scheduling and publishing so many pins has never been so easy. You can plan them a lot ahead of time with all the necessary research. It is easier for one to focus on new stuff if they have already taken care of the next few pins.

If you are amongst those who like to post everything right when they have it, then doing so is again a simple enough task on this application.

It will also be easier to grow while using Tailwind because of features such as Tailwind Tribes. It may provide you that one thing which was holding you back from growing up on Pinterest.

Profile reports and information about Pinterest and trends, in general, will give you a better direction as to what elements should have more emphasis in your future content.

They have also made monitoring a lot easier by allowing the user to customize notifications according to needs.

But we should not forget that Tailwind provides its services for Instagram as well. And things are not so bright on this side.

Even though it provides useful features such as scheduling content for Instagram, the shortcomings are tough to ignore. There should be an option to publish stories and carousels on an Instagram manager.

We suggest you get Tailwind if your primary objective is to manage Pinterest profiles. But if you have any plans of using this tool to manage your Instagram, you may want to give it a second thought.