Pinterest is a pinboard-style, photo-sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, and hobbies. There are 70 million active users on Pinterest, and there are over 500,000 business accounts active as well. Pinterest is a fun place to explore images, videos, and GIFs.

Beyond Pinterest being fun, there’s a lot to be gained from being on Pinterest as a business. Pinterest can give your business brand recognition, an online audience, increased web traffic, retail sales, and more. To be successful on Pinterest and to get the most out of it, savvy users have quickly realized that Pinterest apps are not only the way to go but are a necessity to pinning success.

Here are a few of my most favorite Pinterest tools and how I use them.

1) Pinvolve – Pinvolve automatically syncs your Facebook page and Pinterest pins! Fifty-five thousand businesses are using Pinvolve to sync their Facebook pages and Pinterest content, and to make all of it automatically pinnable, tweetable, and sharable from their Facebook pages.

I have used Pinvolve on several Facebook pages, especially those without a strong website or blog. One of my non-profits has tons of pictures of live events that we put on Facebook. I use Pinvolve to drive traffic from Pinterest to Facebook by pinning some of our best Facebook status updates on our Pinterest boards.

*Free and paid versions available

2) Pinwoot – “Use Pinwoot to get discovered by thousands of Pinterest users and to gain Pinterest followers and hundreds of repins and likes for your pins, quickly and for free.”

Pinwoot is a great app for getting repins, comments, and new followers. You earn “seeds” by sharing Pinwoot with your friends as well as following, liking, and repining content of other Pinwoot users. With those earned seeds, you can promote and schedule pins. I have been impressed by what it has done for my own business account. If you’d like to know more, read this article that I wrote about Pinwoot.

*Free. Extra “seeds” can be purchased for use, and doing so will unlock a few extra features.

3) Tailwind App – “This is a Pinterest Analytics and Marketing tool, trusted by over 9000 leading brands and agencies.”

I love using this tool (I have the free version.) to check out my trending pins, track growth on my boards and my profile, to see what content got pinned from my website, and much more. Using Tailwind app has helped me realize what type of content I need to create and what type of pins do best for my audience.

* Free and paid versions available

Do you have a favorite Pinterest app that you use? I’d love to know about it and check it out!