Does it Matter When I Pin to Pinterest?

Timing matters when it comes to comedy, cooking, and gardening, but what about Pinterest? And why do we ask?

You see, when Smart Feed took over and changed Pinterest from a “show every Pin in the order it’s Pinned” platform to one guided by a complicated algorithm designed to make the feed more interesting and useful to us all, many of us suddenly felt empowered to binge Pin with abandon (YES!) and to rip down the “When should I Pin?” infographics we had tacked all over our office walls. Sweet freedom!

So, Does it Matter When I Pin to Pinterest?

Yes! It does!

In a post-Smart Feed world, Pinterest is looking for signals of user engagement in order to rank your Pins. If your content is posted at a time when it’s likely to get in front of the right people when they are most likely to engage with it, you are sending a powerful signal to Pinterest that they should show it now, often, and to more people!

If instead, your Pins are met with zero reaction because you’ve Pinned when those who might be interested are not on Pinterest, or they’re looking for something else at this time, Pinterest takes that as an indication that your content may not be of the highest quality.

Most important to note is the fact that the impact can go beyond simply depressing the reach of this one piece of content. Over time, repetitive negative signals can begin to reduce the effectiveness of future shares as well. Says Tailwind co-founder Danny Maloney: “This is similar to the concept of the way getting low quality links in Google can hurt your organic search traffic long-term.”

Enter Tailwind’s SmartSchedule

Tailwind has a built-in feature called SmartSchedule that helps you pin when you’re most likely to get engagement. SmartSchedule suggests the best times to post based on your industry, your account, and the activity on your Pins. That means MY Smart Schedule and YOUR Smart Schedule could be very different, but equally effective. Pretty cool, right?

But, what if your’e a die-hard DIY fan? Couldn’t you figure out for yourself the best times and days to Pin? I put this question to Danny and he said,

Let’s say you wanted to test all times in a day to see which work best. There are 1,440 minutes in a day. If you need 10 posts in each time slot to evaluate performance (and you probably need more than that to account for randomness!), that’s 14,400 posts minimum just to get good sample data! It can take a very long time to post that many times; and most profiles never will!

Oh, and if you get that figured out, you still don’t know which day is best AND by now the algorithm has changed, so you have to start over. D’oh!

How Does Tailwind Know When to Schedule Your Pins?

We’re an official Pinterest and Instagram partner, serving over 165 thousand businesses. We see a LOT of data (we’re talking billions of posts) across a wide range of categories. This allows us to spot trends it might otherwise be impossible to catch when looking at just one or a few accounts AND to make recommendations that will work for you.

And because most of our members schedule in Tailwind, we can adjust our recommendations to the types of content they’re publishing. Just add Pins to your queue and go! No data science necessary.

Just goes to show our mission statement is something we strive to meet, “To make world-class marketing easy for everyone.”

Ready to see what YOUR custom Pinterest SmartSchedule looks like? Sign up for a free trial of Tailwind today.