How to Use Pinterest Trends to Find Your Publish Date

Late June, I was on a call with a boutique owner about her Fourth of July collection, and she said a sentence I hear all year in different words: "That was a good one this year, but it's too late now."

She was right. She was also about 11 months early for the thing she actually needed to be doing that afternoon.

There's a free tool sitting inside your Pinterest account right now that tells you almost to the week when customers start thinking about the thing you sell. Most people have never opened it.

You're Reading the Wrong Calendar

We market on the calendar of the event. Pinterest runs on the calendar of planning. Those two sit six to eight weeks apart, sometimes more.

Your customer is searching for a Fourth of July dress in late May, deciding what the weekend looks like and saving four or five options. By the time the flag is on the porch, the decision got made three weeks ago, and somebody else's pin made it.

So this comes down to timing, which is the nicest kind of problem to have. You fix it with a calendar instead of a rebrand.

How to Use Pinterest Trends to Find Your Publish Date: Spotify

How to Use Pinterest Trends to Find Your Publish Date: Apple

Two Lines, and You Need Both

The tool is Pinterest Trends, at trends.pinterest.com.

Inside, two things look similar and behave very differently. Search trends are people typing and thinking about your category. Shopping trends are product-level data ranked by growth, the person who moved from thinking about it to pricing it. You want to be published on the first line and converting on the second.

Most business owners show up only on that second line, on the day, with a beautiful pin and a discount code, then wonder why it felt like shouting into an empty parking lot. You showed up to the closing. The browsing and the researching happened weeks earlier, and that's where the relationship that leads to the purchase actually gets made.

Moments Shows You the Shape

Pinterest recently added Moments to the Trends tool. It pulls together the seasonal and cultural stuff: holidays, back to school, wedding season.

The useful part is that Moments shows you the shape of a season. How interest builds, where it peaks, how it cools off. That cool-off still converts, especially with ads running, so let it keep working past the peak.

Honestly, the peak is the least useful number on the whole chart. The number you want is where the line leaves the floor. That first little lift, where it stops being flat and starts climbing. That's the week your customer started planning. That's your publish date.

Before It Happens

Back to that boutique owner. She'd already written off the Fourth of July for the year.

So we pulled her store analytics from last August to see what people bought when the weather started turning.

Then we started building pins for a season that hadn't arrived yet. Text-based pins and collages of previous pieces, all pointing to the collections page so she'd stay live through the ramp-up even if an item sold out.

She got quiet for a second and said, "Oh. Before it happens." That's the whole job.

Run the Walk Back

Name your next revenue event. The launch, the new collection, the seasonal push, the thing that's supposed to make money.

Go into Trends, pull up that keyword or moment, and look at the 12-month curve. Find the week the line leaves the floor. Back up two more weeks from there. That's your buffer, because Pinterest needs a minute to figure out who your pin is for.

That date is your publish date. Your launch can stay right where it is on the calendar.

Most people run that math and land on a date that's already passed. That's completely normal. A date in your rearview is the first honest look at the gap that's been quietly running your account, and you can't close a gap you've never measured.

Final Pin Drop

I talked with a facilitator this summer who runs meditation and sound work, live launching a six-week course in September. We were talking in late June and she said, "September is close and I have nothing."

My rule for a launch is 8 to 12 weeks of runway minimum, because the ranking takes that long to settle.

So we did the honest thing. September was going to be what it was, and we built the library anyway. You get to miss a window and still launch. The person who publishes now can still own that search when it matters.

You've been reading an event calendar while Pinterest keeps working from the planning one. Now you know where the planning calendar lives, and it costs nothing to open.

Find one revenue event. Find where the line leaves the floor. Back up a few weeks. Put it on the calendar. That's the whole thing.

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