Former Director of People @ Buffer
Have you heard the good news? You can now share, schedule and measure your Pinterest Pins through Buffer!
Buffer Awesome and Buffer for Business customers can:
Anyone can try out this fun new feature! Authorize your Pinterest account now and try scheduling to Pinterest for 7 days free:
In honor of this exciting new partnership, we thought it might be fun to check into some of the science and studies behind Pinterest to learn how to make the most of the seriously addictive visual social network.Read on to discover what we learned about optimizing your Pinterest strategy with the right consistency, frequency and timing.
Like on most other social media networks, a consistent sharing strategy is important on Pinterest in order to build your following.
Most marketing experts agree that spreading your Pins throughout the day is a handy thing to do. Varying your timing exposes you to different segments of the Pinterest population and can lead to more exposure, repins and followers.
And with Pinterest’s recent change to a Smart Feed that personalizes what you see in your account, you can pin pretty much anytime without overwhelming your audience.
So what is the best frequency for Pinterest? What are the best days and times to post? And what sorts of pins do best when? We compiled the best of the data that’s out there into this Pinnable graphic:
Here are more details on each factor.
As we reported in our infographic with SumAll, How Often Should You Post on Social Media?, a good starting frequency for Pinterest could be 5 Pins a day.
Visual marketing service Piqora interviewed 200 big-time brands like Whole Foods, Lowes, LL Bean, and discovered that many had experienced the most consistent Pinterest growth somewhere between “a few pins a week” and “3 to 10 pins per day.” (Note that this survey was pre-Smart Feed.)
On the higher end of the spectrum, the folks behind Ahalogy, a Pinterest marketing platform, say the sky’s the limit when it comes to Pins per day. Pinterest is different than other social media networks, says Ahalogy founder Bob Gilbreath, and requires re-thinking the “social media rules.”
Ahalogy says its clients have seen the best results when they Pin 15 to 30 items per day, with pins spread throughout the day.”
Our best advice? Pin as much quality content as you have time for! You’re very unlikely to overwhelm your followers thanks to the Pinterest Smart Feed algorithm, and each Pin is a new chance to grow your exposure and audience.
Here at Buffer, we like to batch tasks like this to make the best use of our time. You may find that scheduling through Buffer allows you to set up lots of pins in just a few minutes each day!
When it comes to timing, there’s not a bad day to post on Pinterest. But different topics perform at varying levels on different days of the week.
Pinterest shared some great info on these correlations last year. Here’s a look at what people are most like to focus on and Pin on different days of the week:
Additionally, a bitly study found that Saturday is a great overall day for Pinning—when users have some extra time for projects or dreaming.
Some more info that might help: According to recent research from Pew, 17% of Pinterest users visit the site daily, and 9% visit several times a day. A bigger portion, some 29% of users, go on Pinterest weekly, while 52% say they visit the site less often.
All the more reason to Pin consistently and frequently—you’ll catch users no matter what their schedule might be!
With so many different audiences and categories of content, Pinterest provides an interesting challenge when it comes to pinning down (ahem) the best times of day to post.
According to a study of nearly 10 million pins by Digitas and Curalate in 2013, the best times to pin vary by topic/industry.
For example:
Ahalogy found that between 8 pm Eastern and midnight any day is peak time for pinning recipes about chocolate, and discovered that food brands could see the highest repin potential at 8 am and the highest traffic potential from 10-11 pm.
Generally speaking, a good bet might be to focus your Pinterest scheduling around the afternoons and evenings—think about the times users want to take a quick break to daydream on projects, recipes, vacations and the like.
140,000+ small businesses like yours use Buffer to build their brand on social media every month
Get started nowQuicksprout pulled many of the timing stats out there about Pinterest into one recent infographic. Note how most of these findings are clustered in the afternoon, during the time you might want a break from work, and in the evening, when the day’s responsibilities and chores are through.
To find what will work best for your industry and Pins, consider questions like:
With the Smart Feed, consistency trumps perfect timing on Pinterest. Try Pinning across the day to up your chances of reaching more people. If you note that Pins posted at a particular time do well, keep it up in that time slot!
Since uncovering all this research, I thought it might be handy to use it to craft our schedule for Buffer’s Pinterest account. I’d love to share it with you here!
Since we’re a smaller team, we’re starting our Pinterest scheduling on the lower end of the 5-30 range, with 10 Pins per weekday and 15 on weekends.
On weekdays, we’re clustering posts between 2-4 p.m. and 9 p.m.-11 p.m. (all times are Eastern).
On weekends, we’re trying a Pin-every-hour strategy.
We’ll use Buffer’s Pinterest analytics to analyze our follower growth and traffic month-over-month and then make some adjustments. So far, we’ve seen some nice growth!
Ready to set your ideal Pinterest scheduling through Buffer? Get started now!
No matter what frequency and timing you choose, every valuable Pin you share is likely to be well worth it in the long run. Pinterest is highly searchable, so Pins can have a very long shelf life.
In studying the half-life of Pins, Piqora discovered that:
The key, Piqora CEO Shara Verma explained to Venturebeat, is that Pinterest doesn’t share Twitter and Facebook’s emphasis on immediacy. Pinterest visitors browse and search the network in a way that makes it as much like a search engine as a social network.
“In the world of Google, 70 percent of searches are long-tail, composed of four or more words,” Verma says. “Our hypothesis is that the same thing is happening on Pinterest … searching and Pinterest categories resurface the old pins.”
With Pinterest’s Smart Feed, we can expect more people to discover Pins through search and discovery. Here are some tips that could help you set yourself up for search success:
Quick tip: Buffer can lend a hand in making sure your Pins have rich caption info. Try highlighting a bit of info before using the Buffer extension on your image of choice—Buffer will grab the quoted text so you can quickly use it as a caption for your Pin.
We’ve had so much fun diving into all there is to know about optimizing for Pinterest, and I know I still have lots to learn! My major findings here:
Ready to start Pinterest scheduling through Buffer? Get going now!
We’ve got lots more Pinterest explorations coming up on the blog, and we’d love to dig into any questions you might have in particular. Share them and all your other Pinterest thoughts in the comments!
In this article, Nupur Mittal shares insights into four research methods that help her find content ideas and identify unique takeaways.
Facebook marketing in 2019 isn’t dead. On the contrary, it’s far from it. Now removed from the dim outlook that businesses faced at the beginning of 2018, Facebook has and will remain an essential tool for brands’ marketing strategies moving forward. In our big State of Social Media 2019 Report, we found that 93.7 percent of businesses use and are currently active on Facebook — the most among any other social media network. And although we continue to see a dramatic rise in the usage