Almost everyone who is active on Pinterest wants their pins to be seen. This is especially true of those who want to become influencers on the platform as well as those who are promoting their business. Interestingly, one possible approach to improving overall reach and engagement with your content is to find out when to post on Pinterest. Similar to other social media platforms, when you post on Pinterest matters. 

You may have already Googled when is the best time to post on Pinterest to give you some guidance on this issue. However, is this the right approach? While general studies can be an easy way to get some starting information, they may not give you the precise insights you need for your target audience. The good news is that with there is a way that you can use your data as well as data from other profiles to find the best Pinterest posting times.  

In this article, we will take you through how to find what are the best times to post on Pinterest and what you need to keep in mind when conducting your analysis. In doing so, we will discuss the steps you need to take when researching the best Pinterest posting times and what your social media tool must be able to do in order to help you find them.

Are there Best Times to Post on Pinterest and do they Matter?

You may have already asked yourself whether if there really are “best” times to post on Pinterest. After all, you may think that the best posts and content automatically will have an easier time reaching more people. Creating unique and engaging content is, of course, the first and most important step in driving interactions, extending reach, and growing your following. 

However, like the other social media networks, higher engagement rates associated with the pins you post can help you increase your reach and visibility. In short, it matters when you post on Pinterest if you are looking to get your content viewed by more people. The best times to post on Pinterest would be when your target audience is not only online, but also when they are most likely to interact with your posts in some way. 

The question then becomes how you can find the best times to post on Pinterest and what you need to help you accomplish that. More accurately, the question really is what are the best times to post on Pinterest that can help your content get seen by more people. 

While not everyone may be making data-based decisions when trying to find the best times to post on Pinterest, using advanced social media analysis can give you an advantage over those who are not. In order to effectively do this, you need a social media tool and a process for compiling your data set.

When is the Best Time to Post on Pinterest: Making Data-Drive Decisions

As we have already alluded to above, making data-based decisions about when to post on Pinterest is the approach you should take if you are looking to increase engagement and extend your reach. Your goal should be to find the ideal Pinterest posting times that are based on the behavior of your target audience.

We will provide a real-life example related to finding the best times to post on Pinterest for your own profile. This is so you are better to see what considerations you need to take into account for finding the best Pinterest posting times. For our example, we will say that our content interest relates to recipes and cooking tips. In order to find the best Pinterest posting times for our target audience, we will analyze several profiles that are successful in this topic area: Ali Martin (Gimme Some Oven), Allrecipes, Food Folks and Fun, Heidi | FoodieCrush.com, MyRecipes, Natashas Kitchen – Recipes for Dinner and Desserts, Oh Sweet Basil, Savor the Best – Cooking from scratch & recipe ideas, tablespoon, and The Best Blog Recipes. While these profiles were randomly selected, they all focus on recipes and cooking tips while having a significant number of followers. 

The core question we are asking is what are the best times to post on Pinterest for these types of accounts. In finding the answer, we will discuss the important things to think about when doing your analysis. All the graphs showing best posting times below are generated by the all-in-one social media tool Fanpage Karma.

Step 1: Choose What Profiles Will Make Up your Data Set

We have broadly talked about choosing what constitutes a competitor in social media posting times research before, but here we should focus specifically on Pinterest. When you use the right social media tool, especially one that doesn’t limit the number of competitor profiles that you can track, you can easily study the correlation between posting times and engagement rates.

There are two important aspects to keep in mind in choosing what profiles will be in your data set. The first is concerned with the similarity of the content they post and their specific target audience. What is important here is that you are finding times that people who are active and are part of your target audience. When you select profiles that are posting for the same target audience, you add more data points to your analysis. 

Step 2: Focus on a Specific Timeframe

Different months or seasons can result in different times that your target audience is online and active. Because of this, it is recommended to analyze different times of the year in order to discover when to post on Pinterest for specific months.

For example, let’s look at the differences between two months: July 2023 and December 2023. The charts below show the data output from our analysis of the profiles mentioned above for those specific months. Green circles mean that those times correlate with a higher post interaction rate. The size of the circle shows the amount that was posted during a specific timeframe.

(July 2023, All profiles)

As you see here, July shows that late in the evenings from Thursday through Sunday would generally be a good time to post as well as Sunday afternoons and Monday late afternoon. However, what types of trends would we see in December?

(December 2023, All profiles)

December, on the other hand, shows more suitable Pinterest posting times throughout the week. This could be because more people are at home during colder months and more likely to be interacting with posts in the late afternoons and evenings since they are at home. 

The point of this exercise is to highlight the way in which the timeframe you choose can give you different perspectives as to when is the best time to post on Pinterest. You can choose to look at longer timeframes or run the analysis for specific weeks or months. The timeframe that you select should be dependent on what you want to discover.

Step 3: Study your Data

Once you have selected the profiles in your data set as well as the timeframes you are interested in, you are ready to run your analysis and study your results. However, are there things you should be on the lookout for regarding your search for when to post on Pinterest? And are there different ways to select and analyze your data? 

In analyzing when is the best time to post on Pinterest, you always need to keep your goals in mind. The best Pinterest posting times for your account depend on the size of your data set as well how similar the profiles in this data set are in terms of content. Moreover, as we just discussed in the last step, the timeframe of your data set matters greatly. Conducing a best time to post on Pinterest analysis can consist of you looking at different data set sizes as well as timeframes. Below, we will go through a few different examples in this regard. 

First, we analyze our data and focus only on September 2023. We may want to do this analysis in order to plan when we should consider posting for September 2024 by studying past data from the same month last year.

(September 2023, All profiles)

Above, we can see a number of green dots (meaning that those times are correlated with relatively high post interaction rates) throughout the week and at different times per day. However, what would change if we wanted an overview for the entire year for the exact same profiles? Let’s find out.

(Entire 2023, All profiles)

In running this analysis, we may be looking for an overview for the entire year since this is a more long-term view that minimizes any type of short-term trends. This may be useful if you want to find general best times to post throughout the year. The downside from this approach would be if the activity of your target audience is dependent on the seasons. However, if you think this is not the case, then this type of analysis gives you a much larger data set since it is analyzing the entire year. 

But what would happen if we ran an analysis for only a few of the profiles we initial included in our study. Perhaps you thought that the original 10 profiles we named above are more or less similar, but think only a few are highly relevant and want to see what an analysis just for these profiles would show. In this case, we will run an analysis only for Allrecipes, MyRecipes, tablespoon, and The Best Blog Recipes (these are picked randomly for the purposes of this example).

(Entire 2023, Allrecipes, MyRecipes, tablespoon, The Best Blog Recipes)

You can see here that this changes the results of our analysis and gives us a different set of best Pinterest posting times. Of course there is some overlap, but changes to the number of profiles you track has an effect on finding the best times to post on Pinterest for your profile.

You may want to analyze your data in different ways, and the right social media tool should make that easy on you. This flexibility gives you a great opportunity to find the best Pinterest posting times that are in line with your overall strategy. Ultimately, you should run some different types of analysis to better understand where good opportunities may be regarding ideal posting times.

Step 4: Implement your Findings

Researching the best times to post on Pinterest may be interesting, but it remains only theoretical if you don’t actually start posting at the times that your data analysis suggests. You may have established a posting schedule that conflicts with the results of your analysis. However, it is important that you try to post at the times indicated in your results or else you will never know whether it is helping you increase your engagement rate.

One thing that can help you implement your findings is by using a social media content planning tool. For instance, perhaps you are not able to be online during the time you should be posting. A content planning tool can be a great way to create the content and pre-schedule it to go online at a specific time.

Step 5: Keep Monitoring and Adding to your Data Set

The best times to post on Pinterest can evolve with time and, if you continue to add profiles to your data set, there may be some variations. It is important to continually run the analysis we highlighted above to find any changes to the best Pinterest posting times for your target audience. This requires some attention and work, but social media tools can help you do this accurately and efficiently. 

Moreover, you want to monitor your progress once you have implemented your findings into your posting schedule. You most likely want to know how your new posting strategy is working, so monitoring your progress is essential in this regard. You may always want to see how your efforts are helping you in comparison to your competitors, and a benchmarking analysis can do just that. 

Conclusion: When is the Best Time to Post on Pinterest

As we showed above, there is a data-drive process behind finding the best times to post on Pinterest. The good news is that everyone can find these times based on the data from their own profiles as well as other similar profiles. Similar to other social media networks, you can use a social media tool to discover the best times to post on Pinterest to reach your target audience.

Fanpage Karma’s all-in-one social media tool allows you to find the best times to post on Pinterest we detailed above as well as conduct benchmarking and content optimization analysis across social media networks. It comes with unlimited profile tracking as well as leading research, content planning, and community management features. Try Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial and find out for yourself.

There is also a free weekly webinar that demonstrates how to use Fanpage Karma for social media analytics and management.