How I Actually Research Pinterest Before I Pin Anything
Updated: Oct 1
As a therapist, I talk to clients all the time about the difference between anxiety and a gut feeling.
Anxiety is like someone standing on a roof with 14 megaphones, screaming that you should be scared, that you should run, that this is dangerous. A gut feeling is quieter, a dull sensation low in your stomach. One of them is dramatic.
The other one is just data trying to get your attention. I tell clients: your thoughts and feelings matter, but if they're not backed by real data, they don't hold much water.
So when I have a feeling that a topic like travel essentials or fall decor is going to do well on Pinterest, I don't just run with the feeling. I go find the data to back it up.
What Research Actually Looks Like
Here's the honest answer to "isn't research just staring at Pinterest for an hour." No. You have to go a level deeper than the surface. I go into regular Pinterest, not the business hub yet, and type my head keyword into the search bar. A head key word is the topic: "TRAVEL" .
Say my blog is about travel, mostly packing. I type "travel" in and see what populates: travel essentials, travel packing list, travel with kids. Those are the long-tail keywords people are actually searching, not the ones I'd guess off the top of my head.
Then I take those keywords into the Business Hub, click into View Analytics, go down to Pinterest Trends, then Search Trends, and type the keyword in there.
It shows a line chart of how that term has been trending, whether it's climbing or dropping, plus related trends underneath so you can compare. Travel essentials, for example, always seems to peak around June. That's the kind of thing you only know if you actually look.
Once I have the keywords, I go one step further and look at what's already working for that topic, not to copy it, but to actually understand it. Sometimes that's manual, searching the keyword and looking at what pins come up, checking view counts and descriptions, reverse-engineering the format and the hook by eye.
Other times I'll screenshot a handful of competitor pins and hand them to an LLM to break down the format and layout choices, purely as market research, never to recreate someone else's pin as my own.
I've since turned this exact walk-through, the search bar step, the Trends step, and the competitor research, into a prompt I run through AI, so it pulls the suggested keywords, the trend read, and a format breakdown for me instead of me clicking through screens every single time.
That's the prompt I'm handing over below, plus a simple tracker to keep what it finds organized.
What I Did Before (And Why It Wasn't Enough)
Before I had this locked down, I was just dumping my Pinterest images into ChatGPT and letting it go rogue, "hey, just give me some keywords". It wasn't guessing exactly, but it took a lot of time for what I got back, and there was no real system tying the research to what I actually posted.
Research that never makes it into the actual pin is research done in vain, so now the whole point is making sure whatever I find in that search step actually gets used when the pin gets built.
REAL TALK: I only started actively posting to Pinterest in June. I did a batch of around 30 pins right out of the gate and my stats climbed. Then life got busy with my dad's health stuff and everything else, and I went quiet for ages.
Now I'm back with around 70 pins queued up and a scheduler that checks daily how many drafts, scheduled, and posted pins I've got, so it just keeps going without me having to remember to do it.
I'm honestly not far enough in yet to point to one specific pin and say "that's the one research paid off on," and that's okay. It's about averages, not one lucky pin.
But already I am able to see the data trending, the numbers changing and a system starting to signal that it is working and not only is it working, but it's also teachable!
This tracker holds your research. The Airtable Command Center connects that research straight through to the pins it produces and the results those pins actually get: $9.89, credited toward the course if you upgrade.
Want the exact research process, streamlined?
Grab the free Pinterest Research Prompt + Keyword Tracker — the keyword walkthrough, two competitor research methods, and a duplicable tracker to keep it all organized.
If there's one thing you'll learn about me, it's that I'd rather build a system once than do the same thing the hard way over and over. Whether that's a voice memo prompt, an Airtable base that actually holds itself together, or a shortcut that makes me think, "why didn't I build this sooner?", I'm grateful you're here and I hope you found something that makes your own system feel a little more possible. Wishing you clarity, momentum, and a lot less overwhelm wherever you're building.
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