The most pinned articles on Pinterest in Q3 2021

While Facebook may be the dominant social network, you ignore others at your peril. Pinterest, for example, is a huge platform with almost half a billion monthly active users, and while that obviously doesn’t rival the Instagrams and TikToks of this world, it is a niche audience of people looking for a very specific type of content.

For that reason, we wanted to look at the most pinned articles on Pinterest to see the type of content that tends to do well on the platform, and as you would imagine it is very different from other social networks.

In this analysis we looked at the top posts on Pinterest, as well as what publishers were the most successful among the top 10,000 posts. We also took a look at the types of link posts that made up the top 100 posts, from recipes to arts and crafts & beyond. 

To be clear, this analysis is specifically looking at urls from other websites that are pinned on the site, rather than native posts or images. With that clarified, let’s dive in a little deeper. 

The top articles on Pinterest in Q3 2021

The top content was of a very different kind than we have seen in our monthly analyses of what gets the most engagement on Facebook. While those tend to be dominated by the news and political zeitgeists, with some other content mixed in occasionally. 

Pinterest meanwhile is much less concerned with timeliness of the content, and more with how it fits thematically with the platform’s user base. Indeed, the only time the timing of the content seems important is when it is to do with a seasonal recipe, which is the type of post that dominated the most pinned articles on the platform.

The top ten stories offer us a glimpse of this, with five of the top ten articles coming from recipe content. One from Eat Well 101, received more than 600k pins, which puts it on par with some of the very top content on Facebook. This was far and away the most pinned recipe, with most of the content ranging between 60k and 160k pins. For non-recipe content, exercise, health and wellbeing, arts and crafts, and home buying all appeared as topics.

The top ten were a microcosm of the top 100, where recipe content also dominated. 50 of the top 100 articles were recipes, from a range of different websites. Crafts and exercise were the other top categories, with product sales, travel, and fashion and beauty all appearing less often. 

The top craft/DIY stories included inspiration for back to school pictures, DIY clear labels, and ideas for making an art easel. For exercise content, upper body dumbbell exercises, leg workouts designed for women, and core exercises were among the top articles. All of the top articles for exercise come from Spotebi. 

But who were the publishers that appeared most often and had the most pins in the top 10,000? 

The top publishers on Pinterest in Q3 2021

The story for who had the most appearances and who had the most pins painted a somewhat different picture. For this analysis we pulled the top 10,000 posts and compared the publishers of those articles across both metrics, adding together the number of times their articles appeared and also the number of times those articles were pinned. Let’s begin with the number of appearances. 

The Kitchn had comfortably the most stories among the top 10,000, though each individual article of theirs did not get a huge amount of engagement. For example, their top post (on a zucchini butter pasta) only had around 7,700 pins. This was also true for big publishers such as The Daily Mail and Vogue, who although they appeared frequently, saw fewer pins than the huge articles we saw above. The Daily Mail’s most pinned piece was about Princes William and Harry unveiling their mother’s statue and had 4k engagements, while Vogue’s was about street style at the Copenhagen fashion show and had a little over 6400 pins.

In terms of engagement though, it was quite different. Eat Well 101’s one article was enough to push it to the top of the list of publishers of the top articles.

Again, this was a mix of recipes and other content, with recipe blogs and cooking content responsible for more than half of the top publishers. Spotebi was second thanks to its exercise articles, while The Kitchn made the top three thanks to its high volume of articles. E-commerce platform Etsy also made the top ten, with more than 125k pins of products on its platform directly among the top articles in Q3.

So, while it is a very different experience to some other platforms, it should be obvious that there is still a huge audience on Pinterest, with recipe and crafts dominating but also space for e-commerce and exercise advice. 

If you’d like to read our latest Facebook publisher rankings you can do that here.