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Pinterest Stats Drop During The Summer
(And Why You Need To Stay The Course)

Is your Pinterest account feeling that summer slump?

Traffic down? Monthly Views dropping like a stone?

That’s okay, it’s normal.

Above all else, do not panic.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Why Are My Views Going Down?

First and foremost, remember that Pinterest is a search engine. It’s a search engine with pretty pictures, yes, but at its heart, it is a search engine.

But unlike Google, which people use to search at all times of year, Pinterest searches fluctuate because the bulk of Pinterest’ audience are women (yes, that’s changing and men are joining Pinterest in growing numbers, but right now, the majority of Pinterest users are women).

And women (and all users, really) spend less time on Pinterest during the summer.

Pinterest is very popular during the fall and winter months, rather than spring and summer, because spring and summer are months with NICE weather.

Fall and winter months?

Not so much.

During those months, people are inside, and there’s really not much to do but search on a platform like Pinterest for things to do so peoples’ brains don’t dribble out of their ears due to a lack of enrichment.

So, if most Pinterest users are outside, enjoying the nice weather, it means they’re spending less time on Pinterest.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Remember That Monthly Views Are A Vanity Metric

Don’t get me wrong, the goals of reaching 100,000, 500,000, or 1,000,000 monthly views or more on Pinterest are fantastic goals. You should definitely aspire to reach those numbers and beyond.

They do mean that you have a tone of valuable content to offer the people who follow you, and that you’ve been doing the things that make you successful for a long enough time to get those amazing results.

But it’s also important to remember that the monthly views metric is pretty much a vanity metric.

Why?

Because ALL the monthly views metric means is that any pin you pin, whether it’s yours or not, has been seen by a user on Pinterest.

Not hovered over, not clicked, not repined, just seen.

And people have fast thumbs, so having one of your pins seen can be scrolled by in the blink of an eye. That doesn’t help your engagement, nor does it actually bring traffic to your website.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Algorithms DO Change

I’m putting this one in here because it’s not untrue. It’s just not the best thing to scapegoat when your numbers are dropping.

Pinterest can and will change its algorithm at the drop of a hat.

The same things that happen on every other social media platform does happen on Pinterest.

So yes, there will be days where your monthly views take a significant dip, only to hop back up in the following days or weeks.

It has nothing to do with you or the things that you are doing with your Pinterest strategy.

Unless something significant has changed, there is no reason for you to worry if your numbers take a dip for a day or two, but then bounce back up.

What you want to watch for is if your numbers drop and KEEP dropping.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: What Metric To Focus On Instead

Instead of focusing on your monthly views, it’s critical to focus on your monthly engagement.

This is not a public metric, rather this is the metric you see next to your monthly views information on your Pinterest Smart Feed.

It’s also often much smaller than your monthly views metric, but it’s the one you should focus on growing. That’s the metric of the people who see your pins AND act on your pins.

While it doesn’t always mean they’re acting on your pins, the more pins you have being posted regularly from your website, or created period, the more likely it is that the people who are engaging are engaging on your own pins.

Not only that, don’t forget to dive into your analytics to see which pins of yours are getting the most clicks. Recreate more of your content in that design, and ensure that similar pins have high-quality, keyword rich descriptions, and a few hashtags.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: How To Combat It

Now that I’ve covered the primary reasons why your Pinterest account stats may take a hit, let’s talk about the things you can do to make it through a Pinterest summer.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Keep Doing What You’re Doing

It’s that simple. Keep doing what you are already doing.

If you saw great growth in the fall/winter months, then stay the course.

Barring a significant algorithm change, what you are already doing is probably plenty in Pinterest’s eyes to keep your account relevant.

As long as you are consistent with your Pinterest efforts, your account will ultimately see growth. Remember, this is a long game. Your Pinterest account is not going to grow to over 1,000,000 monthly views overnight.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Pin MORE Of Your Own Content

The best way to guarantee that people will find and then interact with your pins, whether they’re your followers or not, is to pin more of your own pins.

When you’re regularly pinning your own content to your boards, you are keeping yourself relevant in the eyes of the Smart Feed.

Even if you don’t have a ton of content, you can still pin in a regular cycle, especially when you have a lot of boards. You are allowed to be flexible with your own pins, and pin them to more than one board, as long as you’re leaving a few days between pins, so you don’t seem spammy.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Create Some New Boards

Another thing Pinterest loves is when accounts regularly add new boards.

You don’t have to do it every week, but once a month or so, you should add in a new board or two. Those new boards means new content, and also allow you to get more creative with the things you talk about as related to your niche.

Make sure, when you create a new board, that it’s not too similar to your current boards, it has 30-50 pins in it already, and that there are a ton of your own pins interspersed throughout all those new pins that you add to it.

Just like adding new pins, adding new boards shows growth and fresh content, and Pinterest is ALL about fresh content.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Create Multiple Pins For Every Blog Post

I would recommend at minimum creating five pins for each blog post you have. That way, if you only have 10 blog posts, you still have 50 pieces of Pinterest content to spread throughout your boards.

This does not mean you have to create five different, new Pinterest designs for every single blog post. That would take FOREVEr.

Instead, create five (or more) high-quality pin templates in something like Photoshop or InDesign or Canva (which is free). That way, whenever you create a new blog post, all you have to do is plug and play.

There are ways to hide your different pin images in your blog posts, giving your viewers an option for which one they like best to share to their own boards (oh, and make sure you put a Pinterest-optimized image in EVERY single blog post you publish – more on that in this post).

Or you can always just have one featured pin image at the end of every single blog post (like I do down at the bottom), and then you can pin the other images over the next days and weeks.

That way you have plenty of new images coming onto Pinterest, even if they’re all linked to the same place. Just remember to link to DIFFERENT posts on your website every time you pin, so it doesn’t look to Pinterest like you’re pinning a bunch of different images to the same blog post.

That’s spammy.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Start Pinning Your Fall Content NOW

According to Pinterest guru Rachel Ngom (of RachelNgom.com), the life of a Pinterest pin is about 1600 times longer than a Facebook or Instagram post.

That means that something you post on Pinterest in the summer is very likely to get traction months or even years later.

So because it can take time for your pin to circulate, get pinned to other peoples’ regular boards, start pinning your fall content now. That way, your pins will pop up as the most relevant when people start searching for back-to-school, beginning of collegiate sport, holiday, etc., content.

You want to take advantage of the time now, in the summer, even when people aren’t utilizing the platform as much, to really make an impact during the times of year where people ARE utilizing Pinterest regularly.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Use A Scheduler

Pinning regularly sounds like a lot of work, because it is.

When you’re trying to find 20-30 different pieces of content, including your own, to pin to your boards, that can take a lot of time.

But it doesn’t have to.

That’s where a Pinterest-approved scheduler comes in. The most popular Pinterest scheduler is Tailwind.

With Tailwind, all you have to do is schedule your pins, and it will share them to your boards according to a schedule that best fits your niche. With Tailwind’s access to Pinterest analytics, it has been able to analyze the best times, and creates slots during the times where your audience is actively using Pinterest.

You can schedule weeks and months in advance to Pinterest through Tailwind, can schedule pins to multiple boards (which really makes it easy to fill your queue weeks and even months ahead), and you can also determine the interval that your pins (or any pin) gets posted.

I personally will find pins and schedule them out with a lot of distance between them, sometimes more than a month apart, because it means that not only am I scheduling for right now, but I’m also getting ahead of things. This also ensures that the pins I’ve scheduled are not too similar.

Tailwind also can tell when you are posting a lot to a certain boards, and it will leave space in the schedule for you to fit other boards into. In short, you can schedule 10 different pins to the same board in a row, but in the scheduler, it will show up with gaps so all those pins are not just feeding to one board.

Click here to get started with a free month of scheduled pins through Tailwind.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Utilize Tailwind Tribes

Another way to ensure consistent growth with Tailwind is to utilize Tailwind Tribes.

Tailwind Tribes are communities where people will share their content with other people, usually in the same niche (though there are any-and-all niche tribes out there), and use that as the place they fill their scheduler from.

Most Tribes request a 1-1 pin rate, meaning for every pin you share to the Tribe, they ask you to pin someone else’s pin to one of your boards.

With the number of pins added to a tribe every single day, it’s very easy to share 1-1, or 1-way more than 1.

The additional benefit to Tailwind Tribes is that you have a higher likelihood that the pins being shared lead to actual blog posts. Many times, you will encounter a great pin in your Pinterest Smart Feed that has only gained traction because it is well designed, but either leads to a blog that is no longer active or no longer exists. With Tailwind Tribes, you are more likely to share a pin that actually leads somewhere valuable.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Pin Manually Too

As helpful as Tailwind is, nothing will replace manual pinning.

Pinterest allows people to use resources like Tailwind, but you can’t ONLY use Tailwind, because Pinterest knows the difference between your account using a scheduler or pinning manually.

And Pinterest wants you to ALSO be using its platform. Tailwind is something use can use to make your life easier, but it doesn’t completely replace pinning on your own.

What I like to do is load up my Tailwind queue once every couple weeks, but also every day I will go in and manually pin a few pins, along with at least three of my own to various boards. This shows Pinterest that you are still around and active, which will help your growth.

The Pinterest Summer Slump: Further Reading

Don’t forget to check out my behemoth of a blog post, 16 Things You Need To Get Massive Traffic From Pinterest, which dives even deeper into what I talked about here.

And remember, consistency above all else will lead you to success, the fastest.

What are your favorite Pinterest strategies to get you through the summer slump? Leave a comment and let me know!

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