Mike McAllen of Grass Shack Events & Media is known as an early adopter of new social media and event technology.  He shares what he learns regularly on his blog Meetings Podcast. Here he shares about tools he’s found that will help you get more out of Pinterest.

Hearing all the hype on this great new social media outlet, Pinterest, Grass Shack Events & Media has decided to give it a whirl! Posting pictures from event, great articles, knowledgable podcast for all of you in the Meeting Planners Industry. Here are some great tips and tricks when using Pinterest for your business. Check out this great article from Flyte Web Marketing, and dont forget to take a peek at our Grass Shack Events & Media‘s Pinterest Page!

1. Picmarkr: Awesome free tool for adding custom watermarks to all of your images. You can use an image watermark or text. A common concern with most businesses, especially photographers is that their work is going to be used without proper credit, this solves that problem in less than a minute.

2. Snagit: Snagit is a cool application that makes it very easy to take screenshots of images and videos. It also allows you to upload your own images and to easily edit and enhance your images. You can add borders, word bubbles, and many other special effects. This is a great tool to spice up your image before you upload it to Pinterest, Facebook or your blog posts.

3. Pinvolve: Currently it’s impossible to pin things from Facebook. Now, with Pinvolve it’s possible to pin from Facebook pages. Pinvolve basically takes your Facebook page and turns it into something that looks very similar to Pinterest. So, you can now pin things from your newsfeed, photos, etc. You simply have to connect this app with your Facebook profile in order to use it and add it to the page you admin.

4. WooBox: Allows you to add a Pinterest tab to your Facebook page for free. This tool allows your visitors to stay on Facebook while perusing your pin boards and also offers some basic visitor analytics. Woobox is free for all tabs and coupons they offer and have paid plans for contests, sweepstakes and more. This is definitely worth adding to your Facebook page.

5. PinReach and Pinpuff: Both of these tools remind me a lot of Klout. It shows you the top pins, the top influencers and gives you a score. It also shows you your followers, repins and which of your boards are the most popular. Pinpuff says it measures your “Pinfluence,” which in their definition is “a measure of your popularity, influence and reach on Pinterest. It also decides monetary value of your pins & traffic your pins generate.”

6. Pinerly: is another analytics tool, however this one is a bit more like Google Analytics than Klout. You can create specific campaigns and track the progress of your pins. Currently Pinerly is still not available for the public but you can get on a waiting list and invite friends to do the same in order to get in. Pinerly has stated that soon they will also offer scheduling for your pins which is something no one else offers at this point and could save us marketers a lot of time.

To read the rest of this post, go to http://grassshackroad.com/pinning Posted with the permission of Mike McAllen.

(Photo by zzpza)