Today after days of testing and staying up most of last night Im finally doing my full review of PinDrill

PinDrill is something that I have had access to for well over a week. In the course of testing this I originally had a ton of complaints. There where GUI errors, weird things with the navigation and things that simply did not work correctly.  I gave the vendors a really hard time when reviewing this and frankly Im surprised they didn’t get sick of me. Even as late as last night I was on Facebook chat with them pointing out things that I felt needed to be improved. Most of these things, the more important ones, have been corrected, though there are a few things that I still feel can be done a bit better. Ill cover that in a minute, first though I want to talk about exactly what PinDrill is.

PinDril is a socal posting tool. Its designed to allow you to quickly find content such as mime quotes and info graphics that you can post to your social networks. By its name its fairly obvouse that this allows you to post to Pintrest but it also allows you to post to other social networks as well such as: Twitter , Tumblr, LinkedIn and Instagram. It does not directly allow you to post to Facebook but there is a way to do it which I will explain in a second. Of the networks available I tested PinDrill on Pinterest and on Twitter. I dont have a Tumblr account and Im not a big fan of LinkedIn personally as its more of a professional network than a strictly social one.

In order to make a post the first thing your going to want to do is search for a keyword. You can search for info graphics, quotes, or both.

The system is very fast. In my testing it only took about a second to find dozens of relevant images for the keywords I search for and I did a lot of test searches.

After you find an image that you like and wish to use you have two options. You can either elect to post (or schedule a post) right away or you can edit the image.

The built in image editor is good, it has all the functions that you would expect such as adding text, image filters, resizing, and cropping. It also has a save and download feature as well which is going to be useful for if you would like to post to Facebook since PinDrill does not directly post to Facebook.

Though the image editor was of decent quality the one thing I did not like about it was the crop feature. In order to crop the image you enter in the dimensions that you would like to crop to. The problem is that if you enter in the wrong dimensions you might crop to much and the editor does not seem to have an undo functionality. This can make precision cropping difficult. A much better approach would have been to have the system allow people to use their mouse to select a specific portion of the image to crop.

The final step is going to be to actually post your image to your social accounts.

This is actually where I had the majority of my problems when I was testing originally.

First of all it was very confusing on how to select the social accounts that you would like to post. The way it was done was not very obvouse at all. However based on my feedback the vendors changed the interface and you can now easily see all your connected social accounts on the left hand side of the posting screen. You simply click the account (or accounts) that you want to psot to. This will add a little check mark next to the ones you select indicating that you post will be made to those.

You then enter in your post text as well as an optional link. After doing this you can click the PUBLISH button and PinDrill will give you two options. You can publish right away or you can schedule you post to go out at a specific time (you can set your time zone in the settings so the scheduling is based on your local time zone).

The scheduling was very problematic when I was initially testing. New posts where overwriting ones in the existing queue. They where deleting them, replacing them. The posts where not going out at the correct times and sometimes not going out at all. I did a lot of testing on the scheduling, gave the vendors a ton of feedback, and even made more than one video for them showing issues I found. In fact this review is a bit late because I was doing final testing this morning on the live server to make sure there where no new issues from when they switched over from the test server late my time last night. Over all they corrected the issues I found. The scheduling works well now, posts go out when they are suppose to and are made correctly to the networks that you select.

There are still some weird GUI issues. For example one of the things I noticed with the GUI was when it displayed dates and times. In some places in PinDrill they had the times shown as a 12 hour clock format. In others it was shown in a 24 hour clock format. I suggested that they should select one format and stick with it throughout the software for consistency. If you look at the screenshot above you can see it seems they decided to change the scheduling time from a 12 hour format that it originally was to a 24 hour clock format. However as you can also see for some reason they left in the AM / PM selector, which was required for a 12 hour time, but makes no sense for  a 24 hour time (there is no am / pm in a 24 hour clock).

Another example is the fact that there is no easy way to get back to the page that shows your scheduled posts. Scheduling your posts is one of the most powerful aspects of this. With PinDrill you can spend a day to schedule all your posts to your social network accounts for weeks in advance and basically put them on autopilot. But there is no easy way to get back to the screen that shows your scheduled posts. The only way to get there is to select an image, click to post it, and then you can return to that section. If you dont actually want to make a post you can just not post the image you selected but still there should have been a direct link in the main navigation menu to go to the scheduled posts screen.

There are several GUI glitches like this throughout the software. Things that do not really effect the functionality of the system but things that for sure would have made the system much more polished and refunded if they had done it better.

Over all though PinDrill works very well. I was surprised at how fast it did the image search for the keywords I entered. I like the fact that it it allows you to schedule your posts and  basically make your social networks as ‘set and forget’ thing.  Also the searching functionality is very useful. Often its hard to even find content to post to your networks. With PinDrill you can get all the content you could ever want quickly and easily. Sure there are some strange GUI issues that could be improved on but over all I feel comfortable saying that PinDrill is a useful tool for anyone using social networks that will save  you time and in short make your life a lot easier.

UPDATE:  I’m not sure how long it will work for but you can try coupon code “Pinoff5” to get $5 off at checkout.

 A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.

About the Author

Brett Rutecky

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Brett Rutecky is a full time online marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur. He has developed scores of Facebook apps, dozens of custom web sites and hundreds of scripts.

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