Pinterest Tools: The Ultimate List by activities (including free tools)

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Best Pinterest Tools

Trying to find the best Pinterest Tools? Well it really depends on your whole Pinterest strategy for your brand and website, how you like working, how much you can spend etc. It also depends if you need Pinterest Tools for business or simply blogging...

You have to find the right Pinterest online Tools and strategies for you.

This is why you will find in this article, all the tools I could find. This way, you can decide what suits you best.

In the meantime here are my favorites:

Free Pinterest Tools & Paid ones

The best tools around Pinterest are sometimes the one you can afford. So to help you go through the list I have listed their price range and included Free Pinterest Tools

Free - Free monthly plan available
$ - first plan udner 15$ a month
$$ - first plan between 15 and 50$ a month
$$$ - first plan over 50$ a month

And if you want to make the best of Pinterest with or without tools, check out my list of more than 100 Pinterest Marketing Tips

Pinterest Owned Tools

• Pinterest App for Mobile phones 

Kind of obvious, I know but Hey, it is a great tool. Wherever you are, you can look for inspiration or do some pinning to your account.

• Rich Pin Validator 

Rich Pin Validator is a tool that allows Pinterest to check the validity of your link and collect Meta Data - Once you have validated Rich Pins, it knows to go fetch your Meta Tag and display your blog title in bold under the pin.
This tool can also be used as a URL debugger when you are having technical difficulties.

• Pinterest Widget Developper​

• Pinterest Analytics

• Pinterest Keywords suggestion 

The Search Bar suggestion tool in Pinterest is here to help Pinterest users narrow down what they are looking for.
But from a business standpoint, it is a tool to see which keywords Pinterest users might be entering in the search bar 🙂

The design of your pins is the most critical aspect to get repins and traffic to your website. And most of it does not depend on your tool but on the approach you are taking of image and text. I dive into it deep in both my courses:

• Canva

• PicMonkey

PicMonkey is a well established tools for photo management. It has less image design options but a powerful photo editing software included. So If you want to reduce the number of tools you are using, it does both editing and pin design pretty well.

• Stencil

Stencil includes a huge number of free to use images and icons in order to create your graphics. They have really nice clean content.
They propose different packages with a limited number of graphics or a monthly unlimited option. 

• Pablo

Free editing tools from the owners of Buffer. It has a good database of free images. It is a lot simpler, but if you are looking for a free option is does the most important things.

• Snappa

Other well structured online design tool. I think the best for you is to try them all for free and see the one that suits you best...

• Photoshop

If for you freedom of design is the most important, then go straight to the Adobe suite with Photoshop. You can have it in the package with Lightroom.

• Illustrator

And to go even further, if you want to draw your design, you can use illustrator and combine it with Photograph

Tools to Source Images

But to create those beautiful pins, you need great images.

Improving your own photos

If you have your own photo that's great. Don't forget to fix them a little with straight horizon and a boost of colors. Otherwise they won't stand out in the Pinterest Feed (check out my article with some Pinterest design tips)

• PicMonkey

As we saw PicMonkey has good basic photo editing combined with the design tools

• Lightroom

But if you are looking for more, I am a huge fan of Lightroom. It is so powerful what you can do with just one click!

Stock Photography

You can also source stock photography to get high quality images. Some websites have free content, other will require your to pay a licensing fee.

There are so many, it is difficult to list them. But here is a selection.
Some will be more adapted to a niche, while other will satisfy other needs.

Completely free

• Pixabay - all types of photos and illustrations - Love it
• Unsplash - Beautiful stock
• Picjumbo
• Gratisography
• New Old Stock
• Public Domain Archive
• StockSnap
• FoodiesFeed

Mostly Paid

• Depositphotos - Great search and payment plans
• Adobe Stock photography - Exquisite choices
• Morguefile
• iStock
• ShutterStock

• jQuery Pin it button for images

Specialized plugin that only adds Pin it button to your selected images

If you look for 'Pin it button' in the wordpress plugin database you will find more options. This was one of the most recently updated I found.

• Shareaholic

Great option to add Pin it button on all your images in your website. They can appear when the image comes into display.

• Sumome

The whole suite of Social media sharing inco of Sumome includes the possiblity of adding Pin it button to appear when the reader hovers over an image.
Note that in the free option, the Sumome branding appears on your website.

Social media plugin

Of course you can also set up your classic social media sharing pluggins to include Pinterest

• Digg Digg
• Easy Social Share Buttons
• ShareThis
• AddThis
• FloatingSocialBar
• Jetpack
• ...

Extensions

• Pinterest browser extension

Pinterest has its browser extensions you can install for free in a few clicks. It allows you to Pin any articles that interest you.

• Tailwind browser extension

We will see in the next section that Tailwind is a fantastic scheduling tool for Pinterest and it comes with its own extension which makes scheduling feel like a breeze!

Pop up

You can also promote your Pinterest account in a pop up.
You either already have a plugin that does pop up and you add a follow button on your designed pop up.
Or you can use a specialized plugin:

• Milotree

Pinterest Scheduling Tools

Specialists Scheduling Tools

• Tailwind

• Boardbooster

The famous Boardbooster did not get approved partner status and has shut down.

• PinPinterest

Started as a Free Autofollow/unfollow tools. It now offers Scheduling options. I have not tried it because it started as follow/unfollow and I don't like spammy account management. But if you are interested, they still offer this option. But be aware that Pinterest seems to be doing changes to render those activities impossible.

Update: Roughly 2 days after publishing this article, I received a comment on this article from a fake PinPinterest users writing how awesome it was. This just confirm my personal opinion about it: SPAMMY.

• Viralwoot

If you are already using ViralWoot for your social Media Scheduling, you can add the Pinterest function to it. Its advantage is that you can loop old pin to republish automatically.

Social Media Scheduling Tools

Less Pinterest features with this option, but there are great solutions for those who don't want to manage hundreds of social management tools.

• ViralTag

One of the big names in social media scheduling. It includes the option to share on Pinterest. Some of the advantages of Viral Tag is that it integrates with Canva (that we saw in the tools for pin design) and with Google Analytics.

• Buffer

Another big name in social media scheduling. Buffer has the Pinterest Scheduling option. 

• Coschedule

Great option for many social networks, Coschedule do offer Pinterest scheduling but with just basic features.

Pinterest related tools

• Pingroupie

Pingroupie is famous to help you find group boards in your niche. You can sort by number of followers and popularity.  But be careful that data is not always fresh

• Pinterest Keyword Tools

Basic tools that provides suggestion of Pinterest Keywords

• PinterestSort

Annoyed by the new way of moving boards around on Pinterest? Pinterest sort is a browser extensions that helps you organize things more easily

• Tailwind Tribes

• Pinvolve

Not convinced by the utility but it must have some since it exists. If you do a lot of cross promotion Facebook/Pinterest, Pinvolve converts Facebook photos into Pins.

• Woobox Pinterest Facebook Page Tab

Cross Promotion between platforms is a good way to increase followers and improve reach. Woobox allow you to add a Pinterest tab to your Facebook fan page

• IFTTT

The "If this, then that" tool also works with Pinterest. So however you want to integrate your Pinterest actions with other activities, IFTTT can help you.

• Loop88

Influence Marketing platform dedicated to connecting brands with Pinterest influencers.

Infographics Tools

Infographics are very popular on Pinterest. They get a lot of repins. So taking the time to design an Infographic for your top articles is worthwhile. Below are some tools to help you do so:

• Canva

For your basic Infographic, Canva is already a powerful tool. It has a lot of icons you can use. For example I did my Pinterest Survey infographic using Canva

• InDesign

To take things to the next level and have all well aligned and well formatted, I think Adobe Indesign is a powerful tool. You might not want to purchase it just for infographics, but if you do a lot of fillable tools for online course or as downloadable opt-ins, then it is a great option.

Infographics Specialists

If you are beginners in terms of infographic design, then you need structure. Those tools are specialized in the creation of infographics, so they can help you get started:

• Piktochart

• Infogram

• Venngage

Pinterest Metrics Tools

Measuring your own Pinterest Success

Let's start with the tools that you might already have that allow you to see how well you are performing in terms of views, interaction and traffic

• Pinterest Analytics tools

As we saw at the beginning, Pinterest has its own analytics tools to see your reach and know your best performing pins over the last 30 days or overall. It is free with all Pinterest Business Accounts

• Google Analytics

I personally prefer to get into Google analytics. I focus on visits from Pinterest and time on site to see potential for conversion. 
Go to Acquisition / Social / Network referrals.

• Tailwind statistics 

Tailwind has a great set of statistics. Timeframe is limited in the first plan but it is already very useful, especially the engagement level in the different boards. It allows you to ditch the non-performing group boards

• Viralwoot

The scheduling Tool Viralwoot provides a lot of statistics about your performance on Pinterest. And the Pin Alerts also allow you to follow other accounts to see what is performing and improve your strategy.

In-depth Social Media Marketing Metrics

If you are a big brand and want to do some performance analysis and comparison with competition, then the following tools can provide detailed data and metrics.

• Quintly

• True Social Metrics

• Cyfe

• Curalate

Curalate works a bit differently using its own image recognition software to see how your content is being shared across all platforms including Pinterest. It is oriented towards brands doing digital commerce.

Mobile Pinterest Tools

• A lot of those tools have mobile apps. For example Canva
• Wordswag to add text to your photos
• Studio
• ...

And if you need help figuring out how to make the most of Pinterest, have a look at my courses that have helped bloggers understand how to use it and increase their traffic:

Found something you like? Any other suggestions?
Leave a comment 🙂

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