How to Schedule Pins on Pinterest

Anyone who has been marketing their business on Pinterest for very long probably has wished for 3 things:

1. To manage multiple accounts (not sure there’s a way to do that yet, Pintics claims to, but they spun off part of their business and have become more of an ecommerce play).
2. To make some boards or pins private (not available yet either).
3. The ability to schedule pins.

Now you can accomplish #3 and schedule pins in advance with at least two Pinterest tools, Pingraphy and Curalate. Scheduling is important because as a business you want to pin during popular times to increase exposure for your pins (generally speaking, before work, at lunchtime and in the evening). At the same time you want to avoid posting too much content at once and overwhelming your followers.

Here’s a short description of each tool you can use to schedule pins.

Pingraphy – www.Pingraphy.com
This is a basic tool that is free. You can’t schedule repins or upload original pins to schedule, but you can pin and schedule images you find online. You login using your Pinterest account and then use their bookmarklet (instead of Pinterest’s) when you want to pin something. You’ll also be able to see your most recent pins and quickly see if you have likes, comments or repins. Click on the image to be taken to the pin on Pinterest.

Here’s a short tutorial on how to use Pingraphy. It’s a good start but it’s not pretty or intuitive. The first time I used it I pinned their site without meaning to. I kept trying to upload a pin instead of going to another website to find and schedule a pin. Also, I’m not a fan of yet another bookmarketlet (my toolbar is getting crowded). However, you can’t argue with the price.

Curalate www.Curalate.com
Curalate is a definite step up from Pingraphy but you’ll have to pay for it. It’s ideal for heavy pinners and brands. They offer more advanced analytics and now scheduling. Instead of just choosing the board and date/time to post your pins, you can edit the URL and all of the details from your dashboard.

It also finds pins from Tweets and Facebook Likes originating from Pinterest. That way you can see which other social networks are driving traffic. Curalate costs $99/month for up to 4 users.

Have you used either tool or is there a Pinterest tool that has scheduling that we missed? Please let us know in the comments.