So you want to use Pinterest for your business this year. Amazing! But how are you going to grow your Pinterest account to drive more traffic, leads, and sales for your business?
You certainly don’t want to be stuck using outdated Pinterest strategies and misguided “best” practices that should’ve been left in 2012 with the teal chevron wedding themes.
What you need to do to grow on Pinterest depends widely on your goals and your niche, but there are some general best practices I can share to help you get started.
Whatever your industry, content, or level of experience, this is exactly what I’d tell any of my clients to do if they wanted to learn how to grow on Pinterest in 2025!
Is Pinterest Still Relevant in 2025?
Given that you’re here, reading this post, I bet you can guess my answer…
Yes, Pinterest is absolutely still a relevant and powerful marketing tool in 2025! In fact, I think we’re going to see Pinterest become an even more important marketing strategy for online businesses as time goes on.
With the US TikTok ban and the increasing popularity in long-form written content like Substack, I think blogs — and naturally, Pinterest — are poised for a comeback. Though if you ask me, they never went away in the first place!
Whether you’re looking to add a secondary marketing platform to support your other efforts or you’re trying to move away from social media marketing platforms like Meta and X, Pinterest is the place to be.
Pinterest Basics You Need to Know
I’m not going to presume aaaanything about what you may or may not know. I truly want this blog to serve as your one-stop shop to learn exactly what you need to do to grow on Pinterest this year, which means starting from the beginning!
If you’re ready for more advanced Pinterest strategies, you can go ahead and skip on to the 9 steps I recommend to grow on Pinterest in 2025!
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a social media and search engine hybrid. Although it’s really more a visual search engine than a true social media platform, it still gets lumped in with platforms like Instagram and Facebook, so let’s just call a pig a pig, k?
Pinterest is a discovery tool that connects creators to users looking for content to inspire and inform their everyday life. From planning life moments like weddings, home renos, and parenting to finding your next content idea or slow-cooker dinner recipe, Pinterest is where people turn when they’re looking for something.
Heads up: that intentional behavior is going to be important when we talk about creating your Pinterest strategy.
The Power of Pinterest Marketing for Businesses
Whether or not you’ve used Pinterest for your business, you should know that there are people out there who are! If you’re an online business owner of any kind, your audience is on Pinterest and looking for what you have to offer.
What makes Pinterest in particular stand out as a marketing strategy for online businesses is that it’s designed to send traffic to your website and content. This makes Pinterest marketing a more effective conversion-driver than other social media platforms that are more connection and community focused.
For the majority of creative entrepreneurs I work with as a Pinterest manager and strategist, Pinterest serves as a top-of-funnel marketing strategy. We use Pinterest to bring in new audiences, growing their email lists full of new leads to nurture into clients and sales.
How Pinterest Works
Pinterest functions based on an intelligent visual and search-based algorithm. I have an entire blog about how the Pinterest algorithm works in 2025 that goes much more in depth, but for now, here’s what you must know:
- Pinterest relies on the information you give it to understand your content
- How well your content gets distributed depends on how well you’ve described it (optimized it for the Pinterest search engine)
- Your goal is to use the keywords and phrases your audience would be looking for
- Both the visual design of your pins and the words you use on the pins and throughout your profile matter for the Pinterest algorithm
- Your Pinterest keywords are the foundation of your Pinterest strategy
Looking for an even more beginner-friendly guide to Pinterest? You can find that here!
Now, let’s talk about what’s actually working right now to help you grow on Pinterest.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Grow on Pinterest in 2025
If you want to grow your Pinterest account, you actually have to start off of Pinterest. Hold on tight, because I’m going to ask you to get a little deep.
1. Set your Pinterest marketing goals
First, ask yourself why you want to market on Pinterest.
- What are you hoping to achieve through Pinterest marketing?
- What goals do you have from Pinterest?
- In an ideal scenario, what results would equal “success” to you from using Pinterest?
Establishing the reason for being on the platform will help you make sure you’re taking the right approach with your Pinterest strategy overall.
2. Get clear on your Pinterest audience
To know your Pinterest audience requires more than filling out an ideal client avatar worksheet or knowing what industry you want to work with.
Depending on what types of people you want to attract to your content and offers, think about what kind of information would best serve them.
- What problems or interests are they having before your offers come into play?
- Remember, Pinterest users tend to be DIYers and information gatherers before they’re purchasers, so it might be different than your target audience for other marketing channels
- What are they looking for on Pinterest? What are the literal words and phrases they’re searching for?
- What kind of content will appeal to them?
3. Create content for that Pinterest audience
Pinterest is more than just another place for your content to live. If you truly want to grow your Pinterest audience in 2025, you need to be creating content that caters to those users.
That means simply auto-publishing your Instagram posts without a second thought isn’t going to cut it. I know it’s easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually doing anything for you.
Ideally, your content will look like long-form content hosted on your own website. Typically I recommend blogging if you want to use Pinterest marketing (here’s why), but you can also make do with podcast episodes, Youtube videos, etc.
And while you don’t have to have your own website to use Pinterest, I highly highly recommend it.
Pinterest is a great way to repurpose existing content and introduce it to a new audience, but that doesn’t mean just reposting the same thing.
Conduct a mini-audit of your own content:
- Does it fit the kind of content your target audience would be looking for on Pinterest?
- Do you have enough of it to pin consistently?
- Does the content align with the goals you want to achieve from Pinterest marketing?
If you answer “no” to any of the questions, you might want to consider taking some time to create content that does fit those guidelines. Your Pinterest growth is almost directly related to the quality of your content, so it’s best to get that solid before putting time and effort into the Pinterest of it all!
Not sure what to create? This content strategy workshop will walk you through my signature 4-step process to create a content strategy specifically for Pinterest!
4. Do your Pinterest keyword research
Okay, it’s finally time to actually get to the Pinterest part of this Pinterest growth guide! I promise you — the prep is worth it. Now, we get to do more prep work 😂
Again, worth it! That’s because knowing what keywords to use as you set up your account and create pins is going to help you actually grow on Pinterest and save time while doing it.
The easiest way to find keywords on Pinterest is by using the Pinterest search bar.
- Type a word or phrase related to your content into the search bar
- Note any relevant suggested searches that pop up
- Repeat as needed
And that’s it! Seriously. Pinterest keyword research doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be time consuming, sure, especially if you like to bang it all out at once like I do.
But if you remember that keywords are simply the words and phrases your audience is searching on Pinterest, you can keep it super simple.
Start by just finding the Pinterest keywords. You can get more specific about choosing the right Pinterest keywords later. And when you’re ready for that part of the equation, this blog post can help you out!
5. Optimize your Pinterest account for growth
Once you’ve done your keyword research, you can start optimizing your Pinterest profile. You’ll use the keywords you found to write your Pinterest bio as well as creating keyword-rich boards to pin your content to.
Your overall profile content isn’t going to be the thing that makes or breaks your Pinterest success, but it is important to optimize it, particularly if you’re trying to get more followers on Pinterest in 2025!
Not every Pinterest user is going to read your profile with a magnifying glass, but we do want to make sure it clearly communicates enough about you that we give the users who do a reason to stick around.
That’s why I usually include some sentence to the effect of “Follow for [keyword 1], [keyword 2], and [keyword 3]” in my clients’ bios. I want to explicitly state why users would want to follow, what they can expect content-wise, and add some extra keywords for the Pinterest robots.
6. Consider your Pinterest board strategy
I won’t go too in-depth about this growth tip, because there are lots of different ways to approach it. However, because Pinterest boards are the thing I see most beginner Pinterest marketers underutilize, we gotta talk about them.
Your Pinterest boards should span a wide range of both general and specific keywords that are relevant to your offers, your content, and your audience.
If you’re a brand designer, I want to see boards like Web Design and Showit Websites as well as boards like Modern Website Design Inspiration and Website Templates for Yoga Teachers.
If you’re a nutritionist, I want to see boards about Nutrition Tips and Healthy Meal Planning, but I also want to see specific boards like Vegetarian Dinner Recipes and Easy Meals for Two.
You don’t have to create every single possible board, and you don’t have to create them all at once. Just make sure you start with a good variety that’s relevant for your content.
7. Start pinning consistently
Now that you’ve gotten clear on your Pinterest marketing goals and built the foundation of your Pinterest strategy, it’s time to actually start pinning.
The quantity of pins matters almost as much as the quality of pins. So while I do want you to take your time and create really solid pins with keyword-rich descriptions and scroll-stopping graphics, I don’t want you to get so bogged down chasing “perfection” that you aren’t pinning enough.
How frequently should you be pinning? I recommend you pin at least once per day. And that’s your own content, not repins.
Being able to maintain this pinning consistency is where having a streamlined Pinterest workflow comes in soooo clutch. As does this Pinterest content tracker, which helps you know what needs to be pinned and when.
8. Pinning for Pinterest growth
Let’s say your goal is to grow on Pinterest quickly, getting the most impressions, saves, clicks, and followers you possibly can.
To do that, I really want you to focus on creating a variety of different types of pins, including different pin formats and different pin graphic styles.
At the beginning of your Pinterest marketing journey, it’s incredibly beneficial to lean into more saveable content like infographics and quotes. As those pins get more saves, your pins will get more reach, boosting your account overall.
9. Follow Pinterest’s lead with what performs well
Once you’ve been pinning for a while, you might notice that some content performs better than others. If you post about a variety of different topics, maybe there’s one that stands out and gets more clicks.
If you’re really aiming to grow faster on Pinterest, pay attention to these patterns and lean in to what’s doing well. Create more pins for top-performing blog posts, create more content around popular topics, create specific freebies or offers to serve an untapped niche… whatever makes sense!
While I typically recommend a Pinterest strategy that blends growth with sustainability, basing more off of what content you have than just what Pinterest likes, you want to know how to grow on Pinterest, so let’s see how far we can take it!
What’s New on Pinterest in 2025
Two of the biggest issues facing Pinterest as a platform in 2025 are ad load and AI content.
Too Many Ads on Pinterest
Pinterest users and creators alike have been complaining about the amount of ads showing up in searches and in the home feed. While this certainly has spiked around the holidays — when many companies increase their ad spend — I’m hopeful we’ll see some correction back to a more balanced feed soon.
AI Images and Pinterest
Many Pinterest users have also noticed a large amount of AI-generated content on the platform. Some niches are more notorious than others — hair and interior design especially. Part of this is due to the popularity of Pinterest as a “get rich quick” scheme. That concept revolves around using AI to churn out trending content and mass post it to the platform with the hopes of driving traffic-based ad revenue.
There’s one Pinterest educator in particular that teaches these methods and I really don’t love what it’s doing to the platform. **cough cough** Tony Hill **cough cough**
That being said, there are some internal discussions within Pinterest regarding a way to mark content as AI-generated, so keep an eye out for any updates!
Predicting the Future with Pinterest Trends
For certain keywords within the Pinterest Trends tool, you can now see what Pinterest predicts the future search volume of that trend will be.
In the past, Pinterest Trends only showed the historical search volume for a given term over the past year. Now, based on what I’m assuming is Pinterest’s averages from past years’ data, you can start planning ahead to see when search volumes increase or drop!
I imagine this will be quite helpful for any business owners or creators with seasonal content. Hopefully, Pinterest will also do a review of how their predictions matched up with reality, because I’m excited to see how accurate the predictions were!
Claiming your Instagram account on Pinterest
This isn’t necessarily new coming into 2025, but the ability to claim your Instagram account on Pinterest is still something to be aware of! At the very least, it gives us more data to analyze and gives Pinterest users an easier way to follow you over to your other social platforms.
This or That: Pinterest 2025 Edition
Hashtags or keywords? Keywords, always. That’s how the majority of users are looking for things, so I follow the user behavior.
Old pin format or new pin format? The old pin format 100%! In case you weren’t aware, the new pin builder actually creates pins that get coded as “idea pins,” which I’ve found often hurt my clients’ overall Pinterest performance.
Turn autopublish from Instagram on or off? Off! If you have a business Instagram, I recommend claiming it in your Pinterest account settings, but I would turn the auto-publish feature off. You don’t have much control over the appearance or optimization of the content, so it’s just not doing much for you.
Videos or images in pins? Images! Some people see success with videos, but as a Pinterest manager, I don’t see video pins turning out results that are worth the extra time they take to create and publish.
How Quickly Can You Really Grow on Pinterest?
If you want the fastest way to grow on Pinterest, here’s the truth: paid ads. But, if you’re committed to organic Pinterest growth, there aren’t any shortcuts or hacks beyond putting in the work.
By following Pinterest best practices, creating content consistently, and using your Pinterest keywords, you can expect to see significant Pinterest growth in around 6 months.
That timeline might be shorter if you’re in a popular niche, have an established account, or have lots of content and time to create pins. On the other hand, that timeline might be longer if you are in a lower volume niche, are trying to grow on Pinterest from scratch, or don’t have a lot of content to share.
The one answer I can confidently give you is that growing on Pinterest takes time. But, unlike other platforms like Instagram and TikTok, it’s much easier to sustain your Pinterest growth once it’s established.
That’s why putting in this effort is so worth it in the long run.
I hope this post has given you plenty of ideas on how you can grow on Pinterest in 2025! In case we haven’t exchanged casual glances across this digital coffee shop yet…
Hi! I’m Sarah, a Pinterest manager and marketing strategist for creative entrepreneurs, service providers, and online business owners. Wherever you’re at on your Pinterest journey, I want you to know you don’t have to do it alone!
Of course, you’re free to read this blog and run — I won’t judge. But in case you’re looking for a bit more support or just want to hear more from your friendly neighborhood journalist-turned-marketer, I’ve gotcha covered:
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