The 2025 Pinterest Marketing Best Practices Benchmark Report - Part 2
Research: How to Get Popular on Pinterest in 2025 — 17 key findings about how to create viral Pins on Pinterest
Published December 9, 2024
Published December 9, 2024
We just studied over 1 million Pins on Pinterest to refresh our understanding of what’s working in Pinterest marketing today. Part 1 of the study revealed the fundamentals of Pinterest best practices as a foundational understanding of the mechanics of successful Pinterest marketing — and also shares the methodology for this research.
A key finding to carry forward from Part 1 is that viral Pins on Pinterest drive the majority of traffic and engagement across the site.
More specifically: the top 1% most viral Pins account for over 50% of total Impressions and clicks alone — while the top 10% most viral Pins account for over 80% of all Impressions and clicks.
In Part 2 of the study we look into how to go viral on Pinterest by analyzing the characteristics of fresh viral Pins:
This is an incredibly juicy section of this research. It leads us toward understanding how to create fresh new Pins today to maximize marketing success on Pinterest going forward. Part 3 will build on these findings to demonstrate how Fresh Pins grow — and set a framework to benchmark success of newer content.
Let’s dive into the data on viral Pins:
While Pinterest distributes content largely on the basis of its substance — that is, what ideas or information a Pin represents — engagement is a key signal in helping Pinterest understand which Pins on a given topic deserve to be seen by broader audiences.
Not surprisingly, we found that Pins generating more engagement are rewarded with more Impressions (i.e. larger audience size) on average. While this finding held true across most ways Pinners can engage with Pins, below we’ve shown what the data looks like when specifically looking at the average number of Saves Pins received based on which tier of virality the Pin fell into.
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Key takeaway: Engaging content gets rewarded. As we continue through this research on viral Pins, consider how the other characteristics of more viral Pins contribute to those Pins being more engaging.
23 different content categories were represented in the top 0.1% more viral Pins.
More popular categories on Pinterest naturally provide more opportunities for Pins to go viral. With larger audiences interested in a topic, Pins that catch on can quickly be distributed to many more interested Pinners.
However, today’s diversity of content going viral on Pinterest would suggest a new norm: that as Pinterest’s user base has grown, so has the diversity of Pinners’ interests. Pinterest’s interest graph seems to be keeping pace, exposing a wider array of content to larger segments of the audience than in the past.
While there’s a definite concentration in today’s very top categories - the top six categories account for 80% of the most Viral Pins in our data set - we’re seeing a significant shift in the mix of content that is succeeding.
Of note: Fashion, Decor and Beauty are much stronger than we would have expected in the past. Meanwhile, Food in particular seems to have taken a step back from its prior dominant #1 position — and other categories such as DIY/Crafts and Travel are less prominent than we have historically seen.
This may be driven by naturally shifting interests as the number of Gen Z Pinners grows rapidly, now surpassing 42% of Pinterest’s global monthly user base.
Pinterest’s strong push toward providing better shopping-oriented experiences may also play a key role, as improved user experience in that regard would align well with greater success for content in Fashion, Decor and Beauty.
For those who are curious, the other 16 categories represented include Architecture, Books, Design, Education, Events, Gaming, Gardening, Health / Fitness, Kids/Family, Photography, Productivity, Quotes, Relationships, Religion, Sports, Tattoos, Travel and Weddings.
It’s also important to note that this distribution (and this study’s entire dataset) may be somewhat biased by the composition of the Tailwind user base. In recent years, ecommerce sites have grown in prevalence amongst our user base relative to other business types — and certain categories, including food bloggers, were among those who more heavily decreased their activity on Pinterest following the introduction of Idea Pins, turning increased focus toward Google as a distribution channel. That shift may now be reversing, however, as Google itself is undergoing some fundamental changes driven by accelerating adoption of artificial intelligence.
Key takeaway: Pins can go viral across a wide array of topics, but if your business is in Fashion, Decor, Food, Beauty, DIY or Art, you may have an especially attractive opportunity on Pinterest.
89% of the most viral Pins were Image Pins.
As discussed in Part 1, when Pinterest shifted their content toward Idea Pins a few years ago, it was by far the most drastic example in the site’s history of suddenly favoring a specific new content format. Beyond Pinterest this wasn’t necessarily unheard of - as networks such as Facebook and Instagram have shifted their distribution algorithms over time to favor new content types that they wanted to bolster.
With Idea Pins now shelved, though, it wasn’t a certainty that the more traditional Image Pin format would rise to the top again. Video has been a growing format across other platforms — notably shortform video like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikToks. Pinterest has also tested out other content formats over time such as Collection and Carousel Pins - although these are now reserved for ads. Collages are the newest such test.
However, the data demonstrates that Image Pins are back in the driver seat - at least for now. Nearly 9 in 10 of the most viral Pins in the study data set were Image Pins.
Video was the next most prevalent type at 8% and collages at 2%, which may sound tiny, but given they were only recently released may suggest a positive response from Pinners.
Key takeaway: Efficiently creating Image Pins with Tailwind Create or other such tools should once again be central to any Pinterest marketer’s workflow. There’s good news here, as Image Pins are generally easier and more cost effective to create than other formats. And with Tailwind Create, we’ve found quality Pins can be created in one tenth the time of other tools, such as Canva.
Maximize your Pinterest reach with the perfect pin size. Use a 2:3 aspect ratio and aim for 1000 pixels wide x 1500 pixels tall. Pinterest will automatically adjust the height, so feel free to use longer vertical images if you please. Avoid shorter images.
While Pinterest has become more flexible over time to accept images in all different aspect ratios, including landscape and square images, data shows vertical images are dominant among the most viral Pins.
While this advice is generally well understood when it comes to Image Pins, we do frequently get the question: What is the ideal aspect ratio for videos on Pinterest?
For video Pins, vertical still rules. Vertical videos with an aspect ratio of 2:3 or shorter were by far most prevalent in the viral Pins data set, comprising 76% of video Pins.
Interestingly, slightly taller videos with an aspect ratio between 2:3 and 1:2 showed stronger engagement statistics, including more Saves and Outbound Clicks per Pin on average - despite receiving fewer Impressions. Conversely, Square and Landscape videos performed quite poorly and received far less distribution.
Key takeaway: Keep your Pins vertical, both for images and video.
Focusing back on Image Pins as the once-again dominant format, one area where we see a lot of debate and energy spent is around marketers’ individual preferences on image style. In particular: should you use Pinterest templates that include design elements and text overlays to expand upon raw photos, or simply post the photos themselves?
In analyzing the Pins going viral today in the dataset, the data suggested there may be different acceptable norms depending on the type of content. In the aggregate, there was close to a 50/50 split across using raw images (i.e. photography, art prints, unaltered A.I. generated images) vs designed Pin images. But across categories the mix differed dramatically.
Here’s the mapping we saw of the top 20 categories among the most viral Pins:
For many marketers, this may suggest taking a more varied approach to Pin creation going forward. Maybe you don’t always need to invest as much time in designing Pins, and can rely on strong photography - or perhaps the opposite is true and you should consider putting more context around your imagery.
It’s difficult to say for certain why the categories fell this way, but from having reviewed many Pins one by one, here are a few hypotheses:
Ultimately, we encourage experimentation - and not getting too rigidly locked into a specific style. You may have a preference yourself, but your target audience’s needs and preferences will be what drives standout performance. Discovering what those might be is a big part of the fun of marketing.
Key implication: The right visual approach to your content may vary significantly depending on your category and the specific types of underlying content you’re promoting. Ask yourself: Is this a product / idea / project that should be self explanatory? Or will the audience benefit from key bits of context?
Another factor we evaluated— and found an interesting correlation vs Pin virality— was the quality of the underlying photo or images being used, whether as a raw Pin image, or within designed Pin images.
Of course, photo quality is going to be subjective, so we tried to keep this evaluation relatively simple in asking ourselves for each image: Does this image appear to have been captured with the skill of a professional photographer, semi-professional photographer (i.e. a blogger who has worked hard to develop their skills in photography), or an amateur photographer?
What we found is interesting through a few lenses:
Overall, though, this data suggests that getting real with yourself about the quality of your photography may be an important step in deciding whether you go forth with your raw imagery front and center, or leverage design to enhance overall quality.
Better yet, try both and let Pinners tell you which you should stick with!
Key implication: You can succeed on Pinterest with all quality levels of raw photographic assets, however, the further away from Professional quality, the more you may want to lean on designed Pin images.
In instances where you want to design Pin images, how should you tactically do it?
We categorized the designed images by which type of tool was used to create each image:
The results we found honestly surprised us:
60% of the viral Pins with designed images appear to have been created using Tailwind Create, or a similar tool.
With the prevalence of Accessible Design Tools today, we were expecting that to be the largest category by far, but it wasn’t.
There are likely a few factors driving this:
There was also not a single designed Pin image amongst the most viral Pins that appeared to require a professional tool such as Photoshop to create.
Key implication: Design tools like Tailwind Create that optimize for time efficiency in creating good Pins appear to be correlated with a higher propensity to end up with more viral Pins when compared to tools that optimize for more granular customization in the design process.
Color palettes on Pinterest are tricky to analyze at scale. There are so many potential combinations that looking at specific sets of 3-5 colors occurring together gets to very thin data quickly.
So instead, we took on thinking about Pinterest color schemes from a few angles:
When analyzing all viral Pins based on the most dominant color, the top colors that emerge are almost entirely white, near white or light greys.
87 of the top 100 hex codes identified as dominant colors in Pin images were white, near white or some shade of light grey. Of the remaining 13, 6 were black or dark grey, 4 were very light shades / soft hues of other colors - and only 3 were bolder, easily discernable colors.
This data obviously doesn’t mean your Pins should be almost all white, near white or grey - but it does indicate that you shouldn’t be afraid of significant lighter spaces in your Pins.
When we remove the whites, greys and blacks, the remaining colors are interestingly polarized: either very soft or very bold. For our analysis, we grouped these colors into buckets that we referred to as “Pinteresty soft” and “Pinteresty bold.” Here are the top dozen most used hex codes in each group:
Seeing this was interestingly eye-opening for us, since our brand color palette at Tailwind doesn’t fit particularly well with these more viral colors. We’re likely going to start testing creating our own Pins more in this palette direction - and intentionally away from our branded colors to gauge the impact on performance for ourselves.
In developing Tailwind Create -- and hearing how our users utilize other design tools - we often hear about the importance of being able to save and reuse a branded color palette. So,when we analyzed the most viral Pins with designed images, we expected to see many people adhering to their own brand colors - but this WAS NOT the case.
In fact, only 4% of the most viral designed Pins used the brand’s color palette as the basis for the design elements and text overlays.
What color strategies were the most viral Pins using for their backgrounds, text overlays and design elements?
Why might designed images with branded color palettes not perform as well amongst viral Pins? A couple hypotheses:
Tailwind Create has an easy built-in feature that will match backgrounds, text overlays and other design elements to the primary colors in your photo.
When using Tailwind Create, just click on “Color Palette” in the left work bar, then select “Image Main Colors.”
All image templates will adjust to use the main colors from your image(s). From there, you can click on the painter’s palette icon on any specific template to rotate through the images colors, to arrive at the specific combination you prefer.
You can then edit your text overlays, calls to action and branding elements across all templates at once, then select as many templates as you like to send to your drafts to add text elements and schedule the Pins.
Key takeaway: Design your Pins to work for Pinners in isolation. Don’t overly rely on your brand colors. Instead, get the Pinners’ attention, bring them back to your site or profile and introduce or reinforce your brand there. Lean into High contrast with very light or dark spaces, complemented by “Pinteresty” colors that are shown to work well in many viral Pins.
Over time, Pinterest has generally moved away from visibly featuring text-based elements on Pins such as Pin titles, descriptions, alt text, and even which Boards they were pinned to. If you’ve been using Pinterest a long time, this may be something you’ve felt intuitively but have never given much thought.
So, if Pinterest is generally not showing much of this text to Pinners, is it even important?
The answer is yes — but not necessarily in obvious ways.
Let’s dig into each key type of text field related to individual Pins (we’ll discuss Boards and profiles in part 4 of the research):
Pin titles are still partially visible in users’ feeds — or at least the first 35-45 characters of them. From a copywriting perspective, Pin titles are the main opportunity you have, outside of the image itself, to convince a Pinner to click into your Pin to learn more. That said, some UI treatments being tested by Pinterest recently remove Pin titles from feeds entirely, so stay tuned for potential changes.
Depending on your strategy, you may use the Pin title to surface key value propositions or benefits of your product or content, or to reinforce search keywords you’re targeting in order to maximize click through rates on search results.
Analyzing the Pin titles of the most viral Pins:
Key takeaway: Use target keywords in your Pin titles. Be intentional about which keyword(s) are most relevant to your audience.
Pin descriptions’ main use today is helping Pinterest understand your content so that it can accurately map it into the interest graph.
Descriptions are generally visible only after a user has enlarged your Pin - and some UX designs being tested are making font sizes on descriptions quite small to de-emphasize them even more.
Even before these changes, descriptions are already truncated, so Pinners mostly only see the first couple lines of your descriptions. The rest is for Pinterest’s use in analyzing your content.
You can use these first couple of lines to provide more information about your Pins to “seal the deal” on the outbound click after a user has entered the Pin closeup. However, accuracy in helping Pinterest categorize your content is the bigger lever for descriptions overall.
In analyzing Pin descriptions of the most viral Pins, we found that more isn’t necessarily better. The most viral Pins tended to have shorter descriptions, averaging in the range of 220-232 characters:
Why might longer Pin descriptions be bad?
Since Pinterest distributes content primarily based on topical relevance, sending mixed signals about what a Pin is about could lead to your content being ranked lower on each individual term. This could happen, for instance, if you use too many distinct keywords on a single Pin.
Instead, keep each Pin highly focused on the most relevant terms. If there are other terms you can adapt it for, make new versions of the Pin targeting those other terms. This will keep each Pin being seen by the most relevant audience possible, which will positively influence your engagement metrics - driving more distribution in turn.
Key takeaway: Keep your Pin descriptions focused. If you find yourself trying to communicate multiple ideas in one description, you’re better off breaking it out into multiple versions of the Pin.
If Pin titles and descriptions are increasingly for Pinterest's own use in understanding and categorizing content, Pinterest keywords are even more critical to include thoughtfully.
You’ll want to use highly relevant, consistent keywords in all text fields - Pin title, Pin description and alt text - to help Pinterest more easily learn about and categorize your Pins. This in turn helps them be added to circulation sooner after being published by the most relevant audience, which positively impacts engagement with the Pin, leading to it being shown to more people.
Feature the most important core keyword in the Pin title to avoid confusion. This is where qualifying keywords can be so useful; they add dimensions to your content, calling out important details (“gluten-free”, “sustainably sourced”, “vinyl”) and value propositions (“easy”, “cheap”, “kid-friendly”, “comfortable”) without confusing the core understanding of what your Pin represents.
Pin descriptions may have more leeway in terms of the number of keywords included.
In analyzing the most viral Pins, we saw a very wide range of keywords included in Pin descriptions --from just one or two to more than 30, but most Pin descriptions used five or fewer.
When using multiple keywords on a Pin, keep them tightly coupled, such that someone searching for one term is likely to also be interested in content about the other term(s) - AND your content is still highly relevant for all keywords used. Keyword stuffing without that tight connection of content to topic will hurt more than it helps.
Key takeaway: If you need help finding ideas for Pinterest keywords, try Tailwind’s free Pinterest keyword tool. Just enter any URL, and we’ll recommend the best match keywords from among those trending on Pinterest.
Pinterest and hashtags have had a bit of a rollercoaster relationship over the years. At one point, hashtags were discouraged heavily, then pushed heavily, then just not really talked about anymore.
The data we saw suggests it’s fine to use hashtags - and that Pinterest will see “through” hashtags to search keywords.
19% of the most viral Pins included one or more hashtags. While we can’t say for certain what % of all Pins use hashtags, we would guess it’s lower than this, so there likely is not any penalty for using hashtags on Pinterest. On the contrary, hashtags are likely being interpreted to represent keywords, helping to classify content on the interest graph.
Of those that did, the average number of hashtags used was 7.3, but that was skewed high. Some users repeatedly used a lot of hashtags in the description (up to 30 of them!), indicating that users who lean towards using hashtags tend to use many of them. The range was once again quite broad, though: from 1 to 30 hashtags used in a description.
To give a sense of how different marketers utilize hashtags, here are some indicative Pin descriptions from different Pinners who both generated multiple viral Pins in the data set AND used hashtags consistently in their descriptions:
Key takeaway: It’s ok to use hashtags in your Pin descriptions. They are likely interpreted as Search keywords specifically.
Pinterest alt text is critical for accessibility of your content. Alt text helps users leveraging screen readers to better understand the context of your images - and the copy in alt text is accessible to Pinterest to further help categorize your content and reinforce keywords you wish to target.
While we were not able to confirm potential root causes with Pinterest directly, the study data suggests that Pins with alt text are performing meaningfully better than those without. Pins with alt text are earning 25% more Impressions, 123% more outbound clicks, and 56% more profile visits on average.
This result could be happening for multiple reasons, although we don’t know which, if any, are driving the improved performance:
We hope to learn more about why this might be happening - and if it is in fact a phenomenon across all of Pinterest. For now, though, we would recommend including helpful, relevant alt text with your Pins.
If you’re unsure how to write strong alt text for your Pins, try out our free image alt text generator.
Key takeaway: Add alt text to your Pins. It’s better for Pinners who need the added context — and these audiences appear to reward Pins with alt text with stronger engagement, which has algorithmic benefits.
Following the introduction of Idea Pins, many marketers saw their Image Pins begin to perform far worse than they were used to. The underlying cause of this was largely connected to how hard Pinterest was pushing Idea Pins.
Pinterest wanted Idea Pins, and they drove their audience aggressively toward Idea Pins as a way to incentivize Creators to invest more of their precious time in making them. This left far less audience for other Pins types - especially Image Pins, which historically made up the vast majority of Pinterest’s content corpus.
This distribution benefit for Idea Pins wasn’t highly publicized, however, so marketers were left guessing as to why their Image Pins were now performing worse. Some started asking if scheduling Pins was hurting their performance - and if they should just Pin on Pinterest directly. The challenge with these tests was that they often covered (a) very few Pins, and (b) Image Pins being scheduled vs Idea Pins being published organically. The core issue was the change in preferred content format - but many reached the wrong conclusion not understanding that.
In the years since, Pinterest has repeatedly stated that Pins scheduled through partners were handled no differently than Pins created directly on Pinterest.
The sunsetting of Idea Pins and timing of this study gave us the perfect opportunity to analyze if this is in fact true.
So what did the data tell us?
Pins driving high volumes of traffic were up to 54% more likely to be published through Tailwind than to be published directly on Pinterest or through any other means.
To help interpret this data: 26% of Pins studied were published through Tailwind. So 54% more likely would mean: 26% * 154% = 40% of Pins driving over 1,000 outbound clicks were published through Tailwind-- far more than the average across all Pins in the study.
Does this mean we believe that Pins scheduled through Tailwind are given some bonus by Pinterest?
No.
The stronger performance of Pins published through Tailwind is likely more driven by Tailwind users’ adherence to best practices when creating and publishing Pins. Tailwind guides users to follow best practices at every step of the Pin creation journey, so on average, Pins published by Tailwind are likely better Pins. In addition, Tailwind users learn best practices more and more over time, helping them become better Pinterest marketers.
Key takeaway: Pins scheduled and published through Tailwind outperformed Pins published by any other means, including on the key metric of Outbound Clicks.
One such best practice that Tailwind guides users towards is publishing at the best times to Pin on Pinterest.
If you research this topic, you’ll see an echo chamber of SEO link farm content citing each other about the best times to post, generally based on small samples of Pins from years ago.
The truth is: the best time to Pin on Pinterest is not the same for each account.
The audiences that engage with different types of content are active on Pinterest at different times. And these trends change as the audience evolves.
So, we do not profess a generic “best time to post on Pinterest.” Instead, we offer a feature called SmartSchedule, which will adapt to the specific type of content your account Pins.
Trends related to that type of content - and broader activity - are analyzed to recommend when you should be publishing. From there a SmartSchedule is built for you based on the target the number of times you want to Pin each day.
A sample SmartSchedule:
From there, you can simply add new Pins to your queue, knowing that you are Pinning as close to the best time to post on Pinterest as possible.
Key takeaway: Tailwind’s SmartSchedule calculates the best time for YOU to post on Pinterest, not a generic answer.
The last key observation we want to call out from the study data about viral Pins is this:
Pins that have Pinterest’s shoppable recommendations enabled perform better than those that do not.
This may sound counterintuitive, but diving into the data demonstrates why this is the case.
Shoppable recommendations has been a controversial feature since it launched, specifically because some Pinterest marketers don’t like the idea that after doing all the work to get Pinners to view THEIR Pin, the Pinner might click on SOMEONE ELSE’S link.
We get why that might feel off-putting.
But here’s the thing: those added links and images lead to FAR more clicks on Pins with shopping recommendations. Those clicks are engagement signals. And stronger engagement signals are rewarded by Pinterest with more distribution.
While it’s true you may lose some Pinners to others’ Pins or products, the NET BENEFIT of getting more distribution on your Pins outweighs that loss.
The core reason for this is that it’s a better experience for Pinners - and Pinners reward what works for them.
The specific stats we saw:
The disparity across categories here is likely driven by how often Pinterest is able to map shoppable recommendations to the content of specific types of Pins today. Fashion and Decor are perhaps easier categories to identify objects in photos, which can then be mapped to other similar products. Today, we see these two categories leading the way, but assume shopping recommendations will become more prevalent with time.
Key takeaway: Do NOT turn off the shopping recommendations on your Pins. Doing so will likely result in your Pins being see by significantly fewer people - and having a much lower chance of going viral.
That’s “ALL” we have for you today (6,270 words later…).
Come back for Part 3 of the research to learn how to benchmark new, fresh Pin performance. Given how long it takes Pins to growth into their distribution, this can be tricky. But today’s fresh Pins are tomorrow’s viral Pins on Pinterest.
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.
