How to Find Pinterest Trends That Fit Your Brand (Not Just What’s Popular)
Every Pinterest guide tells you to “jump on trends”. Fewer tell you which ones. Pinterest’s own Trends tool (trends.pinterest.com) will happily show you what millions of people are searching for this week — and almost none of it will be yours.
A trend is only worth a pin if it’s three things at once: people are searching for it, the searching is growing rather than fading, and the people searching are the people you serve. Here’s how to check all three without a marketing team.
Popular, rising and yours are three different things
A popular search can be past its peak. A rising one can have nothing to do with what you sell. And a search that fits you perfectly might be small and steady — which is fine, because steady searches keep sending people to a good pin long after a spike has passed.
So don’t start from the biggest number on the screen. Start from the question: would someone typing this be glad to find my pin?
A matching word isn’t a matching person
This one caught us this week. On our own Pinterest account, a trend view flagged “best small business ideas” as a perfect match — because our account is about Pinterest for small businesses, and the phrase contains “small business”.
But think about who types it. Mostly, it’s people deciding what business to start: side hustles, things to sell, shops to open. Our readers already have a business and want Pinterest to work for it. A pin aimed at that search would collect views from the wrong people and saves from almost none of them.
The check is quick: search the phrase on Pinterest yourself and look at the pins that come up. If they aren’t the kind of thing your customers look for, the trend isn’t yours — however well the words match.
Start from your own phrases, plus the broad word for your niche
The best seeds for a trend search are the words your own customers use: the phrases on your best pins, your product names, the questions people ask you. Write down five.
Then add the broad word for your niche — guitar, wedding, home decor. Very specific phrases often have too little search behind them to show up in a trend tool at all. In our own testing, a brand described only in long, specific phrases found no trends at all until the broad term was searched alongside them. The broad word finds the trend; your own phrases tell you whether it fits.
Read the direction, not just the size
A trend number on its own doesn’t say much. What matters is the direction: is interest growing, steady or fading — and over what window? A search can be up this week and down over the month, and the honest answer is then it isn’t clear yet.
When the numbers disagree with each other, don’t pick the exciting one. Treat it as one to watch, make a pin only if it fits you anyway, and check it again next month.
A trend pin has a date on it
A pin that says “rising on Pinterest” is true the week you make it. By December, an October trend is a false statement with your name on it. Put the month on trend pins, and retire or remake them when the season turns.
Timing works the other way too: people plan ahead on Pinterest, so a seasonal trend is worth pinning weeks before it peaks, not the week it does. We cover that in Seasonal Pinning Without a Content Calendar Headache.
The smallest version of this that works
Once a month: take your five phrases and your niche word, look up what’s rising around them, and keep only the trends that pass all three checks — searched, growing or steady, and searched by your people. Make one pin from the best of them, with the month on it. That’s a trend habit, not a trend chase.
Doing this in Pin Pal Discover
We built Pin Pal Discover to do these checks for you. It’s a Chrome extension that sits in the browser’s side panel:
- It learns your brand from the Pinterest boards you choose, and drafts a brand profile you check, change and save.
- You type a topic and pick your region. Discover asks Pinterest what people are searching for around it, and what’s rising there.
- Ideas that fit your brand come first, each with the evidence behind it: which way demand is moving, how it fits your brand, and where it came from.
Here are two real results from a guitar-art account. First, Pinterest reports +400% growth for guitar gif — but the week and the month disagree, so Discover says demand is not moving clearly rather than calling it a hit:
Second, an idea that fits the brand with no live trend behind it, timed for the next planning window:
Brand fit is matched against the words in the profile you saved, and Discover shows you that match — so you can still apply the check above and judge it yourself. Discover finds the ideas; making the pin stays with you. It’s $9 USD a month, and the first month $5.
)
Save to Pinterest
Written while building Pin Pal Studio
We run our own Pinterest account on the products we’re building. Pin Pal Discover finds what to pin next; Pin Pal Studio makes the pins and paces them safely, and you approve every one before it publishes.
Get started