As my faithful readers surely already know (and I am certain you are one of them ;) ) I have been interested in Pinterest for some time now. I have also explored the world of automation (bots) for both Pinterest and Twitter. I am bringing this up, because I hope you will follow my automation guidelines when using the tool I am going to present to you now.

Just like other social medias, your usage of Pinterest can be automated - or, as  I like to say, partially automated - with social media software. A good bot, when used the right way, can help your account grow. When used the wrong way, it will turn you into a spammer. There is no doubt in my mind that Ninja Pinner can do both. But my objective - just like yours I hope - is to use it to help me grow my account, not to spam.

This review of Ninja Pinner is based on my personal, real use of the application. As usual, when I post a review of a service or product, it means I have tried it for real. As you must have seen by browsing this website, whether it's good or bad, I don't hesitate to voice my opinion loud and clear...

   

  

It's all about reactivity...

As surprising as it may seem, I won't start by presenting its functionalities. I'll start with something that has surprised me in the beginning - but in the right sense of the term: the update frequency. The development team is really on the edge, they add new features regularly and follow the changes on the Pinterest website, and they take into account their user's suggestions - as a matter of fact, a couple of weeks ago, I told them it would be interesting, when re-pinning, to be able to keep the original description and add a sentence of our own to it (originally you could either leave the original description or replace it altogether). Guess what? I got an update today with, among other things, that new feature! It is the 3rd point in the screenshot on the right.

Since I bought Ninja Pinner about one month ago I must have seen at least 4 or 5 updates. It's good to know they're actually doing their job. I'd hate to buy an application and then be unable to use it just because Pinterest has made a slight change in its design!

Follow to gain more followers

Just like on Twitter, in order to be successful on Pinterest, you need more followers. And to do this, you are going to follow people in the hopes they'll follow you back. Obviously, for this to work you need to have a good and complete profile, with your picture, a description, and interesting boards... Ninja Pinner will let you auto-follow people based on your search criteria but it can't force them to follow you back ;)

The procedure is fairly simple: first, you will gather user names. You will notice on this screenshot that most of the screen is occupied by a web browser (I don't think Pinterest has released an API yet anyway), more specifically this is of course Pinterest.com, so all you have to do is to navigate to the category you're interested in or make a search, and then start gathering. With the auto-follow objective in mind you would of course gather user names, if you wanted to auto-like or re-pin you would gather pin IDs. Once you have enough user names, stop gathering and go to the auto-follow section on the left, hit the "start following" button and you're done! Now all you have to do is wait.

A word of caution here: you should set the delay (in the Options menu) to 15 seconds or more. This is the delay the application will wait between two operations. If you try to go too fast, you will quickly run into captchas - because your activity won't look natural. Which reminds me, if the guys from Ninja Pinner read this, randomizing this delay (adding a few seconds more or less each time) would be a good idea, so we don't always have the same delay ;) I'd bet we'll see this feature in a few weeks...

Update June 12th: looks like it took them only a few days, I got this new feature in today's update ;)

Do you like me?

Auto-liking, in my opinion, can be used in two ways: either in the hopes that someone you're not following will get interested in you, or to try and get some of the people you're following, but who are not following you back, to follow you.

Re-pinning frenzy

The mass-repin feature is particularily interesting, especially now with that new feature I have suggested and that I was mentioning above. Just like when gathering user names or pin IDs you can re-pin based on a category or a search. It is even possible to change the pin's URL, but I am still not too keen on this, as per my automation "code of conduct". The other re-pinning features are just fine, though.

Unfollowing

You obviously don't want to keep following and end up with thousands of people that are not following you back. This would look suspicious! Fortunately Ninja Pinner also includes an auto-unfollow tool. You can even tell it to exclude the people you have followed recently - this is a rather new feature appeared a couple of weeks ago, which IMHO is absolutely vital.

Are there limitations?

Technically, as far as the software is concerned, no. But you don't want your Pinterest account to raise any red flags. You will find more details about this on Ninja Pinner's blog, but it is advised that you don't follow more than 275 people per day, the same goes for auto-liking.

Conclusion

Ninja Pinner is a powerful tool. If you are on Pinterest to do business, this is probably a very good choice. The price is rather reasonable for a tool of this quality ($47 for the single-account version or $67 for the multi-accounts one) I am convinced you won't regret your purchase. Besides, there is a free demo... So you can try it at no risk :)