A Pinterest scheduler that fills in the whole pin

The three parts of a pin

The title is the line people read first, shown above everything else. It is what persuades someone scrolling a grid of images to stop on yours, and it is a field Pinterest reads when deciding what your pin is about.

The description sits under it and has room to explain. The detail goes here: what the thing is, who it suits, what someone gets by clicking. It is also the part that gets indexed, so writing it for a person searching rather than for a caption is most of the work.

The destination link is where the pin sends people. For anyone using Pinterest to bring people somewhere, that link is the entire point of the pin, and a scheduling tool that drops it leaves you with a pin that goes nowhere.

All three are set while you compose and travel with the scheduled pin.

Carousels and images

A pin can be a single image, a video, or a carousel of two to five images. Carousels suit anything with steps or variations: a before and after, four colourways, a recipe with its finished plate first and the method after.

Every image takes its own alt text, up to five hundred characters. On Pinterest that description does two things at once: it makes the pin usable by people with screen readers and gives Pinterest more to go on about what the image actually shows.

Boards, and the sections inside them

In sona.to each Pinterest board connects as its own channel. Connect three boards and you have three channels, which is what lets you schedule to each one separately and see them side by side on the calendar rather than picking a board at the last moment.

Boards can also have sections, and a pin can go into one. When you open the section row it loads the sections for the board you are pinning to, so you are choosing from that board's own list rather than a generic one. Leave it empty and the pin goes to the board itself.

Sections are worth using on any board that has grown past a single subject. A board with four hundred pins and no sections is harder for a visitor to use than one that is organised, and the section is chosen once, while you are already writing the pin.

Everything stays with the draft

The pin options sit in collapsed rows that show their current value, so you can see what is set without opening anything.

All of it saves with the draft. Come back tomorrow and the title, the link, the section and the alt text are still where you left them, which matters more on Pinterest than elsewhere because a pin has more parts to lose.

Timing, and why it matters less here

On most networks a post reaches whoever is around when it lands, and misses everyone else. Pinterest does not work that way. Pins surface through search and through recommendations, so a pin can find its audience weeks or months after you published it.

That changes what scheduling is for. It is less about catching an hour and more about publishing steadily, and about getting seasonal material up far enough ahead that Pinterest has had time to circulate it before the season arrives. Anything tied to a holiday, a season or an event is better queued weeks before you need it.

Posting time still counts for the first hours of a pin's life, when your own followers see it. Our guide to the best time to post on social media covers where those windows tend to fall.