Tailwind vs. BoardBooster: Why I Choose BoardBooster

This post may contain affiliate links. You can read my full disclosure here.

Update June 26, 2018: It has been announced that BoardBooster will be shutting down on June 27, 2018.

If you have been blogging for even just a short while, you know how important Pinterest is for your traffic. In fact, it could even be the biggest source of your traffic. It certainly is for me right now!

And with that means you have to pin – and pin a lot. Although some bloggers prefer to manually pin (I’m still not sure how they have the time for that!), many of us choose to use a Pinterest scheduler.

So when it comes to an automated system, most bloggers choose either the Tailwind App or BoardBooster.

Although I currently use both, I use BoardBooster the most. This is because BoardBooster makes it a lot easier for me to just set it and forget it. And with how busy I am, I like anything that is going make my life easier!

I am going to begin by doing a side-by-side comparison of each of the Pinterest schedulers.

If you want jump down to where I explain why I like BoardBooster better, you can click here boardbooster_over_tailwind.

Free trial

Both platforms give you an opportunity to do a free trial.

Tailwind: You can schedule and publish up to 100 pins for free. This can take as little or as long as you’d like.
BoardBooster: You can publish 500 pins for free for 10 days.

Pinterest approved

Tailwind is approved by Pinterest.
BoardBooster is not approved by Pinterest, which means there is always a chance it could get shut down. But needless to say it is still very, very popular.

Pricing

Tailwind is $9.99 a month for an unlimited amount of scheduling.

BoardBooster is $5 monthly for 500 pins, $10 monthly for 1000 pins, and then it goes up $10 monthly for every 1000 more pins a month (a penny a pin). I am currently paying $15 monthly for 1500 pins a month and it has been working great for me.

Scheduling

Both Tailwind and BoardBooster let you schedule chosen pins.

Tailwind: You schedule pins into Tailwind’s suggested time slots or pick your own time slots. They are very easy to schedule with the “Schedule” button that hovers above pins. Tailwind will then post the pin for you at whatever time you choose.
BoardBooster: You schedule pins using BoardBooster’s Scheduled Campaign. To do this, you pick pins to go into a secret board on Pinterest to later be pinned automatically by BoardBooster to whichever public or group board you specify. You can do this right from the Pinterest pin.

BoardBooster uses analytics for the best time to pull the pin from the secret board and pin it to whichever board(s) you specify. You can set up ahead of time the number of pins you’d like pinned per day, the time frame you want them pinned during, and to not have them pinned again within so much time (I set mine up to not have duplicate pins within a 30 day period).

Both of these options take time to set up because you need to find and choose the pins and then either schedule them on Tailwind or add them to your secret board on BoardBooster. After the scheduler pins them, they are then removed from each platform so you have to set them up again. This is, in my opinion, is very time consuming. There is different reason I love BoardBooster and I will be getting to that shortly.

Tribes

Both Tailwind and BoardBooster have Tribes, which means you are connected with a group of people that post your pins.

With Tailwind Tribes, when someone sees a pin you added to the queue, they then add your pin to their scheduler.

With BoardBooster Tribes, you upload your pins to your tribe and then Boardbooster automatically schedules your pins to your tribe member’s source boards. (I actually do really like this feature!).

BoardBooster-only features

Pin Sourcing

If you create a new Pinterest board and don’t want to take the time to fill it up, you can find a large board and have BoardBooster automatically pull relevant pins from that board to pin to your new board.

I also sometimes use Pin Sourcing as a way to automatically pin from my group boards, as many group boards require you to repin others’ content. I choose a group board and which of my boards I want pins from that group board pinned to.

Looping

I have not yet taken advantage of Looping but I hear it works well for many bloggers. With Looping, BoardBooster will pull some of your oldest pins on your boards and repin them to the top of the board. After some time, BoardBooster will delete whichever pin is getting less repins.

boardbooster_over_tailwind.

The #1 reason I prefer BoardBooster over Tailwind

OK, so here is the reason I have put this post together. To share with you why I prefer BoardBooster over Tailwind. It all has to do with Random Campaigns.

Random Campaigns

First, I have to give credit where credit is due. I learned how to take advantage of Random Campaigns from Billionaire Blog Club and I have been able to tweak what I learned to make it work best for me.

(Billionaire Blog Club is a fantastic online course all about blogging and has helped simplify my blogging strategies in so many ways! The door is not always open to new members, but you can still check it out in case you’re interested for when the doors do open.)

Random Campaigns are a great way to get your pinning strategy almost fully automated.

With these campaigns, you first create a source board on your Pinterest Profile. This can either be a secret or public board. You then select Target Boards, which are all the boards you want the pins from your source board to pin to.

For example, I like to use Random Campaigns to pin to my group boards. So I first created a source board on Pinterest and labeled it “*All Things Finances*.” Then I put all of my money-related pins into the source board and set up all of my money-related group boards as the Target Boards for this campaign. BoardBooster will then select pins and pin them to the different Target Boards based on the specifications I set up, as you can see in the example below.

I have many different Random Campaigns set up for pins to go to different types of group boards.

The reason why I love Random Campaigns is because I used to spend hours choosing which pin to pin to which group board every weekend. I always had to be careful not to pin one more than once in a 30 day period, as that is typically group board rules. I never even spent time trying to also figure out pins to schedule during weekdays. It was all just too time consuming for me.

With Random Campaigns, I pin to the source board and my pin stays in there until I choose to delete it and BoardBooster does the hard work for me by choosing what to pin when. So every 30 days or so that pin will get pinned again and the only thing I had to do was set it up once!

This has absolutely changed the way I pin and I have seen my pageviews grow since I started using this method because I don’t run out of time to schedule pins. They’re already set up for me! There were so many weekends where I just couldn’t get to scheduling like I had wanted and therefore my traffic tanked.

This strategy has also freed up a lot of my time so I can focus on other parts of my blog while still increasing traffic. That is so important to me!

I still try to do some manual pinning everyday, but BoardBooster is the first method I use to pin.

Why I still use both Tailwind and BoardBooster

I had already paid for a year of Tailwind so I continue to use it. And it does have some good features!

With new pins, I like to start getting those out into circulation right away. So I will use Tailwind to schedule those and then add them to my source boards on BoardBooster after 30 days (I wait 30 days to be sure I have no duplicate pins on any group boards within that amount of time).

Will I keep Tailwind after my year is up? I am still not sure. Like I said, there are benefits to both. I could just create another Campaign on BoardBooster with only my new pins and those should get pinned pretty quickly. But I will reevaluate how Tailwind is working for me when the time is up.

If you have yet to try either Tailwind or BoardBooster, I highly recommend at least using the free trials of each to see which one you like better.

I think a lot of people give up on BoardBooster pretty quickly because it can be a little confusing to learn. But with just a little bit of time, it doesn’t take long to get the hang of it. Billionaire Blog Club has some pretty great videos to demonstrate how to use it.

The bottom line is, if you are looking for more of a hands on approach, then go with Tailwind. As I said, it really is a great service depending on what you’re looking for and what works best for you.

But if you’re looking for something a little more automated to save you time and energy, then BoardBooster is definitely the way to go!

Which Pinterest scheduler do you prefer? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

If you think this post could benefit others, please share 🙂