Published November 19, 2024
The data revealed 33 key findings about how to grow on Pinterest, some of which defy long-held beliefs in the marketing community.
In this Part 1 of the study, we look at the fundamentals of success for organic marketing strategy on Pinterest, tackling the first four key findings:
Make sure you’re subscribed to our email list as there are more juicy findings in Parts 2 (viral Pin characteristics), 3 (how Fresh Pins grow) and 4 (Pinterest strategy best practices) — coming soon.
With Idea Pins being retired recently, the mix of content surfacing in Pinners’ home feeds and search results is changing rapidly, enabling the emergence of new content creators — as well as re-emergence of some who fell off during the Idea Pin era. Billions of impressions per month are up for grabs that would have previously gone to Idea Pins.
As one of the first three Pinterest developer partners ever, Tailwind has seen major evolutions on the platform before, but this period of change may be the most rapid yet. We needed to study this large of a data set to test our own historical assumptions about best practices in Pinterest marketing so we can continue to guide brands who trust Tailwind for Pinterest marketing services on how to grow on Pinterest.We studied over 1 million Pins to learn what’s working in Pinterest marketing today, as a lot has changed heading into 2025.
Over 60% of Saves were from Pins over a year old.
Top Pins can keep driving traffic and engagement for a very long time.
In this way, Pinterest is more similar to Google Search than it is to the “social media” platforms it often gets categorized alongside. On social media, new content tends to get engagement for just a few hours to maybe a couple days if you’re lucky. Pins, like Google search results, can continue being Saved and clicked on for years.
In the past 90 days, over 60% of Saves on Pins linking to users’ websites were on Pins over a year old - and over 40% were on Pins over two years old.
For the purpose of this study, we’ll refer to the top Pins that get surfaced a lot as “Viral Pins.” The term “viral” is used loosely, because Pins on Pinterest can “win” distribution in different ways: they may be seen more because they are Saved and engaged with more, or they may be highly relevant for specific popular topics and search results — or some combination thereof. Either way, it is unique to Pinterest that content continues to be shown to users this long after it is published.
Viral Pins peak in engagement between year one and two but may have a long life even after that.
Pins may technically live forever in that you can always find your old Pins, but when it comes to which Pins Pinterest actually shows to their users in feeds and search results, even the most viral Pins will eventually peak and then start fading off into the sunset.
Among the Pins that drove engagement during the study period, those that were between one and two years old saw the greatest number of Saves per Pin, being saved on average 68 times in the last 90 days.
Compare that to 44 new Saves on average for Pins that were between 90 days and one year old, and 49 new Saves for Pins over two years old.
Pins over two years old is a broad group, but on average, after Pins hit the two year mark, they are seeing less engagement with each passing year.
Amazingly, the oldest Pin still driving engagement in the data set was created in July 2010 — over 14 years ago! Despite its age, that Pin received over 10,000 new impressions and over 200 clicks in just the last 90 days.
Keep in mind: these older Pins still driving engagement are the exception, not the norm. Most 2010 vintage Pins are likely no longer being surfaced in any meaningful volume. These were the winning viral Pins of their time, and some of them continue to delight new Pinners who see them today.
The amazing power of Pinterest marketing is that when your content wins, not only can it win big, but it can keep winning big for a very long time.
With that said, half of the Pins driving engagement to the profiles in the study were created within the last year. These new Fresh Pins hold the key to future success.
Over 90% of traffic to creator and brand websites were from Creates.
When Pinterest began differentiating “Creates” from “Saves” in the early 2020’s, it may have seemed a superficial distinction, but the change has had major implications for how content is distributed on Pinterest.
“Creates” (a.k.a. “Fresh Pins”) are brand new Pins generated by Creators or Business accounts, usually to promote content on their own website.
“Saves” (a.k.a. “Repins”, “Duplicate Pins”) are generated when any Pinner Saves an already existing Pin to one of their own Pinterest Boards.
Prior to differentiating Creates from Saves, content owners would often see someone else’s Save of their content receive far more distribution than their own original Pin. Now, Pinterest has significantly diminished the distribution of Saves, funneling that visibility toward the original Create instead. This increases visibility for content creators, which helps them grow followers faster.
Today, the vast majority of traffic being driven to content creators’ websites are coming from their own original Fresh Pins.
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Saves remain an important engagement signal to help Pinterest know which Fresh Pins to surface (more on this in Part 3 of this research), but Saves won’t be shown in Pinners’ home feeds or search results often.
The top 1% of Pins drove the majority of impressions and clicks.
Success on Pinterest is a bit like playing the lottery. Most Pins will earn very little lifetime distribution, but the most successful ones win big.
Just how big though?
The Top 1% most viral Pins accounted for over 50% of the total Impressions and Clicks across all Fresh Pins published in the last 90 days.
Conversely, the bottom 80% of Fresh Pins accounted for less than 10% of all Impressions and Clicks.
This disparity likely grows with time, as the less successful Pins are removed from distribution and the winning viral Pins accelerate into higher levels of distribution beyond their first 90 days.
This is yet another reason why Pinterest recommends that creators try to publish as much as 5-25 new Fresh Pins per day. Success is in part a numbers game. Most of your Pins won’t succeed, but if you publish more Fresh content, you have a better chance of generating a higher number of Winning Pins over time.
Having a system in place to create a high volume of high quality, Fresh Pins on a consistent basis is a critical part of any Pinterest marketing strategy (cough cough…schedule Pins with Tailwind!).
Glad you asked. Read on with Part 2 of this study, where we’ll look at the characteristics of the most viral Pins among the 1.2 millions Pins studied. :)
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This study looked at data spanning over 17k Pinterest creator and business accounts and over 1.2 million Pins:
The accounts included were chosen at random from the larger universe of accounts Tailwind has permission to pull data for.
While this number of accounts and Pins is a pretty large sample size, there is certainly a likelihood of bias in the results due to the composition of Tailwind’s user base, which may not be representative of the entire Pinterest creator and business universe. For example:
Tailwind is a marketing software platform, trusted by over 1.5 million creators and small businesses. Tailwind was one of the first three Pinterest API developer partners ever, dating back to 2012, before Pinterest had an official partner program. Try Tailwind’s newly updated Pinterest Scheduler for the easiest way to create, schedule and publish Pins.
