How to Study a Pinterest Account That’s Beating You

Pinterest is the most transparent platform I have ever worked on, and it is strange how little use people make of that.

Every board somebody has is public.

Every pin on it.

The order they arranged them in, the names they chose, which pins got saved the most — all of it visible without logging in, without a tool, without asking anybody.

On most platforms this would be an expensive research product.

Here it is a browser tab.

And yet when I ask people what they have learned from looking at the accounts beating them, the answer is almost always some version of "their pins look nicer than mine".

Which is not a finding.

It is a feeling, and it is usually not even true.

The mistake underneath all the other mistakes

People study competitors to find things to copy.

That is the wrong output, and it is why most competitor research produces nothing.

The things that are easiest to copy are the things that transfer worst.

Their pin design is tuned to their brand and their audience.

Their voice is theirs.

Their exact headline already exists, and a reworded version of an existing pin is a worse version of an existing pin.

What you are actually looking for is structure: which subjects keep winning, which phrases they have built around, how narrow they had to go before they got traction, and — the valuable one — what they never cover at all.

None of that is copying.

All of it transfers.

The loop

This is a cycle rather than an audit, and that matters, because a one-off study produces a document nobody opens again.

The step people skip is the fourth — actually testing something.

It is very easy to spend a satisfying afternoon reading other people’s accounts and produce a page of notes and no change to your own publishing.

If nothing you do next week is different, the afternoon was entertainment.

Step one, which decides everything else

Pick the wrong accounts and every subsequent step gives you confident, useless answers.

The instinct is to study the biggest account in your niche.

It is the worst possible choice: an account with 400,000 followers has a distribution advantage you do not have, so things work for them because they did them, not because the things are good.

Copy their playbook and you get their results minus the audience, which is to say nothing.

Your competitor is whoever appears when you search the phrases you want to appear for.

Not who you admire, not who is your size, not who has a nice grid.

Who your Pinterest competitors actually are is the whole first step, and getting it right takes about twenty minutes.

What to actually look at, in order

Once you have three or four of the right accounts, here is the running order.

Each of these has its own post because each is genuinely a skill, but the sequence is the thing to take away.

• Their board list. The fastest read on the whole account — what they committed to, what they abandoned, and which board name shows somebody had done keyword research. How to read a board list.
• Their top pins. Not their pins — their top pins, which are a different and much shorter list. How to find anyone’s best-performing pins.
• Their keywords. The phrases their titles, descriptions and board names are built around. Finding a competitor’s best keywords is the existing guide to this.
• What is missing. Across three or four accounts, the subject none of them cover. Content gap analysis is where most of the value in this whole exercise lives.
• Their design patterns. Last, and least, and with care. Reading pin design without copying it.

The part that is genuinely hard from the outside

Everything above is readable in a browser, and I would encourage anybody to spend an afternoon doing exactly that before spending money on anything.

What a browser cannot give you is volume.

You can see that a competitor has built three boards around "rental kitchen ideas" and infer that it worked for them.

You cannot see how many people search that phrase, whether it is growing or fading, or how it compares with the four adjacent phrases you are choosing between.

So you end up inferring demand from one account’s behaviour, which is a sample of one — and that account may simply have guessed too.

That is the gap PinPinterest fills: real search demand behind each phrase, how crowded it already is, and which pins are actually winning for it across the whole platform rather than on one profile.

It turns "they seem to do well with this" into a number, which is the difference between research and a hunch.

The niches we track shows how well covered your corner is before you start.

How often to do this

Properly, twice a year.

Lightly, whenever you are planning a batch of content.

Twice a year is enough for the structural picture — who is winning, what they have committed to, where the gaps are — because those move slowly.

The light version is different: before you plan a month of pins, spend twenty minutes checking what is currently ranking for the phrases you are about to target.

That moves fast, and it is the difference between planning against last year’s search results and this week’s.

What I would not do is check on competitors weekly.

It is the most seductive form of procrastination available to anybody who publishes, it produces no decisions, and it makes you feel worse.

If you are looking more than about once a month and not changing anything as a result, you are not doing research.

The output

A good competitor study ends with three things written down, and if you have not got all three you have not finished.

1. Three subjects that clearly work in this niche — evidenced by repeats and saves across more than one account, not by one pin doing well.
2. One thing nobody is covering that people plausibly search. This is the finding worth having, and the gap post is how to be sure it is a gap rather than a desert.
3. One thing to change next week. A board to rename, a subject to try, a format to test. If this line is blank, the study did not happen.

Keep the notes somewhere you will look again — which is what a swipe file that actually gets used is for, and why most swipe files do not qualify.

And if what you are really trying to work out is whether the niche is worth being in at all, that is a different question with a different method: using Pinterest as market research covers deciding before you build, rather than competing after you have.