Social Media: Why you should take advantage of Tailwind and tribes

At last year's TpT conference, I  became sadly aware that my presence on social media was pretty nonexistent.  When I got home, I dove right in. Start an Instagram account?  Yup!  Create a Facebook page for my business?  Yup! Start pinning?  Yup!
It was summertime, after all.
And then the school year began....

Where should you spend most of your time?  Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook?  You can't judge them in the same way because they serve very different purposes.  But which is best for you?

Facebook:

• Puts your information out to a large group of people.  If it happens to catch a lot of their eyes, hopefully they'll share it - that's how things go viral.  
• Lasts a short while. Think of how much feed is above the first post you read when you've spent half an hour there!

Instagram:

• Visual and quick.  
• Great way to share your products and a little bit about yourself - combine some product pictures, some personal photos, and a few thoughtful or funny quotes and you're good to go.  
• To keep people engaged, you need to have clear and engaging visuals 
• Post a couple of hashtags that allow others to find you.  
• Post regularly.  Like multiple times a day.  

Pinterest:

• Slow moving, but has longer staying power.  
• Different purpose - people don't use it to see what their friends are doing.  
• Search and discover tool
• Because people pin and oftentimes come back later to look at their pins, there's a shelf-life for pins that doesn't exist in the same way for Facebook and Instagram.

That difference taken me a year to figure out.  While my results will be different than yours, when I look at my analytics on TpT, Pinterest is always second behind TpT.  It makes sense to spend most of my limited time there.

So how does Tailwind fit in with Pinterest?

• Tailwind is an "organizer" app that allows you to pin relevant pins, days, weeks, or months in advance.  
• You receive pinning time recommendations based on your past history.  
• You can pin as few as a couple of pins a day to over 100.  Don't go crazy!  I adjusted my numbers a few times before I found that 15 pins a day worked for me.  
• If you want to take advantage of Tailwind, here's my referral link which will you give a free month's trial.  Tailwind also pins to Instagram now, so you can try that feature, too.

Tailwind Tribes should be a no-brainer!

• They are free 
• . Tribes vary by topic or grade level and most expect that you'll pin as many other peoples' pins as you post of your own.  
• The beauty of tribes is that you benefit (and add to) the collective reach of your pins. Which means that your pins could get in front of thousands, or ten or hundreds of thousands of people you don't normally have access to.  
• If you're not part of any tribes right now, ask on Facebook if you can join some.  Most tribes are open to having new members.

Remember: your goal is to have more time to create and revise products, not to be working on marketing.  It takes time to create a presence on each of these social media apps so pick the one that works best for you and spend your energy there!