Let’s be honest, if you’re a marketer and trying to reach audiences through Pinterest and Instagram, the posting, tracking and reporting process is painful. This is mainly because the applications are designed to stay within “the box” without “big picture” considerations for integrations for automation tools like Hootsuite, Hubspot or Marketo, which manage the process in an efficient, streamlined process (for the most part).
If you’re a marketer for a small business, you have precious little time and need to be as efficient as possible. This means centralization is key and the best tools to help simply pushing messages to multiple channels is paramount. Unfortunately, Pinterest and Instagram did not originally design their platforms to integrate with efficiency platforms, which means the marketing manager is forced to post on each platform separately, or with partial integration and no reporting (which is the point – to report on engagement and return on investment).
However, I was pleased to find an application designed to help manage and report on Pinterest and Instagram recently called Tailwind. It’s a stand-alone application that also plugs into Hootsuite if you’re using this for your social media management, and it provides analytic reporting on Pinterest. It’s been a huge time saver for us and so far, I’m loving the tool. It also integrates with Google Chrome which allows you to pin directly from the customer website – brings the photo and content over, as well as the URL to click-backs.
Why am I writing about this? Because to-date, posting on all social media platforms is a nightmare and can suck the time out of you as a marketer and I’d like to help my fellow colleagues out, that’s why.
According to Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com, there are over 3,874 marketing solutions on the market today. That’s an 87% growth over last year. Scot does a great job of tracking this market and its crazy growth – if interested, you should check out his blog and subscribe.
In the meantime, however, I defer to the KISS philosophy (Keep It Simple Stupid) and select tools that are functional, simple, inexpensive and do the job quickly and easily. Yes, our portfolio of “tools” or “solutions” is growing, but so is our business, and it’s why I love marketing – you learn something new every day. As long as it pays off for the client in the end, and provides at least 20%+ growth, then I’m all for it. You get what you give.
