How Pinterest dominates the Thanksgiving recipe scene

It’s rare that Pinterest is the dominant force in any social engagement conversation, with Facebook and Twitter the typical big drivers of engagement for web links, especially to the news. 

Where Pinterest shines though, is food and fashion, and Thanksgiving is basically the World Cup when it comes to recipes. 

That being said, we wanted to look at some of the most influential recipes on the platform, and see how many engagements they are getting compared to the likes of Facebook and Twitter recipes. 

The top Thanksgiving recipes on Pinterest

The sites that see success on Pinterest are often not the most mainstream ones, as blogs and personal websites outperform even the big food publishers on the platform.

The top article on Pinterest when it came to recipes was a Turkey Veggie Tray from Lil’ Luna, which is getting towards 200k pins, while a cheesy root vegetable gratin has also seen more than 100k pins for the website Spoon Fork Bacon.

Perhaps the only household name to feature in the top ten list is Delish, which featured twice for its turkey advice and stuffing recipe, but these saw far fewer pins than some much less well-known sites.

It is particularly interesting to note these successes vs. other social platforms. The top recipe on Facebook, for example, was a recipe for apple tarts, and has only 5k engagements.

The top publishers of Thanksgiving recipes on Pinterest

This theme was also reflected in the top websites overall, as success was often driven by a single recipe, or at most a handful of articles.

For example, Lil’ Luna had 194k pins on its seven articles that made it into the top thousand, but the vast majority of those were driven by its Turkey Veggie Tray.

Of the top publishers, Delish had the most recipes in the top 1,000 with 39, which pushed it into third place in terms of the number of pins on its content. 

The rest of the top ten were all blogs.

Number of Thanksgiving recipes in the last month

In terms of the number of Thanksgiving recipes that have been published in the last month, there have been around 35k in English alone.

Generally, beyond the top 1,000 these got relatively little attention, having pins in the low double digits, but it is still a substantial number. It has been increasing every week as we have approached Thanksgiving too, with the last two days the biggest in terms of recipe publication so far. 

If you’d like to keep track of what’s going on on other social networks, you can check out our Facebook rankings here.