How to Use Pinterest Trends to Find Blog Post Topic Ideas

As you and I both well know, coming up with viable topic ideas for blog posts is really, really hard. I mean, hell, I made an entire tool just to help myself do it for my clients.
Keyword research, competitive analysis, topic difficulty… it’s a lot.
Since this is a problem everyone running a blog will face eventually, it’s also something that every marketer out there has written about. I’ve even written about it before. My advice ends up looking a lot like the advice everyone else gives, which might seem disappointing, but it’s really just reflective of reality. There are only so many tools and resources you can use to do topic research.
This leads to a strange sort of convergence in blogging:
- People use tools like Semrush, Answer The Public, or any of the Google autocomplete scrapers. Since hundreds of bloggers are all getting essentially the same data, they all tend to write similar content, so that content ends up trending for a while.
- You also get trend chasers who watch what’s actually going viral and make their own copies and repetitions of the same thing. You know, sort of like how sea shanties were big on TikTok for a while, or how every food blog seems to publish the same set of recipes around the same time, that kind of thing.
How do you stand out from this hive mind of content creation? Well, since you read the title coming in, you can probably guess that I’m about to suggest Pinterest. While that’s true – and this post is pretty much just about using Pinterest Trends for topic ideation – I also want to take a moment to shout out my tool, Topicfinder.
I run a content marketing agency, and as my agency grew, I quickly found that topic ideation was pretty much a full-time job. I’m talking a literal, for-real 40-hours-a-week kind of task. That kind of thing isn’t sustainable! So I started to work on a tool that could automate all of the topic ideation and research I was doing and just give me lists of topic ideas I could filter through at my leisure, suggest to clients for their approval, and file away for future use.
The end result was the prototype for Topicfinder. Once I had it nailed down and proven through my agency’s clients, I realized it might be useful to other people as well. So, I refined it, gave it a nicer GUI and a few more useful features, and released it as a product. I think you’ll love it if you give it a try, which is why it has a free trial.
But that’s not the point of today’s post, so keep on reading to learn how to use Pinterest Trends to come up with topic ideas.
How Pinterest Trends Works
Pinterest Trends is one of the more useful ways Pinterest caters to the fact that it’s broadly used for marketing purposes. You can find it at https://trends.pinterest.com/, which brings you to a page where you have a keyword search bar (and region selection box), a list of the current top trends in the last 30 days, and a bunch of filters for common searches like seasonal trends, yearly trends, growing trends, and so on.
You can filter the results for a search using parameters you’ll be familiar with if you’ve run PPC ads before: basic demographics and interest. Specifically, you can pick gender (male, female, unspecified), age ranges, additional keywords for filtering, or interest categories. Pinterest’s interest categories are things like Animals, Art, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Home Décor, Sport, Travel, Wedding, and so on. There are 24 of them in all, so it’s not the most robust list, but it’s still decent for basic filtering.
If you’re an existing Pinterest user and you have a large enough audience, Pinterest will also show you a set of customized trends based on your audience. If you don’t have a large enough audience, they won’t show you anything and instead will just give you some tips on how to grow a following.
When you get a basic readout of, say, monthly trends, you’ll be able to see a bunch of trends with some basic information. It’s all familiar stuff if you’ve used Google Trends before, but in short, it includes:
- The trending keyword, like “Christmas Cookies.”
- A small graph showing the trend over time in your chosen date range.
- The percentage the trend has changed in the last week.
- The percentage the trend has changed in the last month.
- The percentage the trend has changed in the last year.
Christmas Cookies, for example, has jumped 30% in the last week and 400% in the last month but is down 30% in the last year. I guess people aren’t posting as much about cookies this year. Meanwhile, a generic trend like “Recipe Ideas” is down 1% from last week but up 100% from last month and up 10,000% since last year. This is data as of the time of this writing, of course, so those numbers are just for illustration purposes.
Note: Some trends have a crystal ball icon next to their little graph. This is an advanced feature Pinterest adds to certain trends, usually seasonal trends, and it’s a button you can click to see a predictive analysis of where they think the trend will go in the next three months. This is primarily for seasonal trends and uses past years of seasonal shifts to predict how this year’s version will go. It’s a good feature to check so you don’t do something like deciding “Christmas Nails” is a good trend to chase the week after Christmas.
When you use the search bar for a specific keyword, Pinterest will show you trending topics for that keyword so you can pick one. For example, plugging in “Christmas cookie recipes” shows suggestions like Christmas cookies, cookie recipes, easy Christmas cookie recipes, and Christmas recipes.
When you click on a specific topic, you get the annual graph of trend performance. For Christmas trends, obviously, it’s going to be pretty flat most of the year, with growing interest from about mid-November to just after New Year’s, where it falls flat again. For more generic trends, the traffic varies a lot more.
You can also see a variety of useful bits of information for your chosen trend.
- Related trends and their micro-graphs, which you can click on to compare to your currently chosen trend.
- Interest split by age range and by gender.
- A display of some of the existing popular pins targeting that keyword.
One more useful note is that since all of this is in Pinterest’s advertising dashboard, there’s an ever-present button in the corner labeled “create campaign.” If you want to create an ad campaign using the trend data, you can just click that button, and you’re off to the races. I’m not really going to talk about this, though, since the goal here isn’t PPC or even using Pinterest itself; it’s using the information you get from Pinterest to generate topic ideas for your own blog and marketing channels.
Overall, Pinterest Trends actually isn’t all that complicated. It’s fairly basic in terms of the data it shows, especially if you’re used to using something like Glimpse Trends, which gives you a ton of much more detailed information (from Google).
The question is, how do you extract good topic ideas from Pinterest Trends?
Finding Topic Ideas with Pinterest Trends
Actually getting topic ideas from Pinterest Trends is both easy and surprisingly tricky.
It’s easy because Pinterest isn’t all that complex a platform. People post content on the site as pins, pins get traffic according to audience interest, the more popular the pin, the more the topic trends. When you search for a keyword, then, you can see what the most popular pins are for that keyword, and you can take those ideas and run with them for yourself.
It’s surprisingly tricky because, well, if you do what I just described, you’re going to be perpetually behind the curve.
One of the biggest flaws with trend monitors is that by the time you notice something trending, you’re already behind. That’s why Glimpse is powerful; it uses a lot of machine learning and other data sources to predict trends before they kick off. Pinterest tries to do that with their “predict the future” for certain trends, but it’s almost always ones that you can predict the future on your own anyway. It doesn’t take predictive analysis to tell that Christmas-related topics are going to be less popular in the middle of the summer.
There are a few ways you can deal with this.
- You can accept that you’ll be a bit late and trust the quality of your content to carry you. Most trends aren’t going to have a sharp end date other than specific holiday trends and the like, so as long as the trend doesn’t lose too much steam, you can still capitalize on it.
- You can plan 8-10 months in advance. For seasonal trends, at least, they always come back around. Certain details might come and go (maybe next year, Elf on the Shelf won’t be as popular, for example), but the overall trends are still mostly valid.
- You can seek out trends that look like they’re about to pop off. This is the best option, but it requires a lot of active monitoring of your keywords to see how they’re performing.
You can also seek out meta-trends. For example, in the process of researching for this post, I’ve seen other posts on the same topic, and their screenshots tend to cover the most recent holiday. For me, it’s Christmas, but for others, it’s things like Halloween, the 4th of July, or Valentine’s Day. One thing I’ve noticed is that all of those have a “[keyword] nails” trend, which tells me that themed nails for a holiday are always going to be an important trend. Worth a look for beauty and lifestyle blogs!
Overall, there are a few decent ways to use Pinterest Trends.
Look at the kinds of content being posted for trending keywords in your niche. When you search for a keyword and look up that keyword’s trends, you can see the most popular pins. This gives you an idea of what sites are trending (keep that in mind for later), as well as the sorts of graphic design they’re using in their pins, which can inform your angle on a topic.
Look for specific trending topics within a larger keyword. Usually, you want to use long-tail keywords for research, but the opposite is kind of true on Pinterest Trends. Pick a broad keyword and see what narrower topics are trending within that overall topic. This can help you pick sub-topics to cover.
Compare sub-topics and see which are trending better. Even related keywords can trend differently due to the nature of how keywords and Pinterest searching work, so you can pick out the more valuable of the topics – or the ones that aren’t being covered as much – and use that to create content.
Use this information to create content rapidly. One of the biggest downsides to using trend platforms to come up with topic ideas is, as I said, you’re already behind the curve by the time a topic is trending. To get the most use out of Pinterest Trends, you need a rapid content creation turnaround. If it takes you more than a week or two to take a topic and turn it into a published piece of content, you might be too slow for most trends. The early bird gets the worm, after all!
Use Pinterest Trends with Topicfinder
My final tip is to take the information you get from Pinterest Trends and use it outside of Pinterest’s ecosystem. For example, when you find websites that are dominating trends with their pins, you can use those domains as seeds for Topicfinder to find all of their best content and come up with topic ideas based on that. You can do the same with the keywords you pick out.
If you want to see how you can do all of this, Topicfinder has a free trial you can use to explore what it can do for you. I really do recommend it, so give it a look!
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