Your Pinterest Competitors Aren’t Who You Think They Are

Ask somebody who their Pinterest competitors are and they will name two or three accounts instantly, without hesitating.

Ask how they arrived at that list and it turns out to be some combination of: accounts they follow, accounts that made them feel slightly bad once, and the biggest name in the niche.

It is a list assembled by attention rather than by evidence, and it is almost never the list that would be useful.

The useful definition is narrower and much less flattering to everybody involved: your competitor is whoever appears when somebody searches the phrase you want to appear for.

That is it.

Not who is in your niche, not who is your size, not who you have been quietly measuring yourself against for eight months.

Why the admired account is the wrong one

This is the one I want to spend the most time on, because it is the most common and the most expensive.

A very large account has a distribution advantage.

Their followers see their pins.

Their existing authority means new pins are shown to more people before anybody has decided whether the pin is any good.

So when a pin of theirs does well, you genuinely cannot tell whether it did well because it was a good pin or because they published it.

Which makes their account close to useless as a source of transferable lessons, and actively dangerous as a benchmark.

I have watched people conclude that a perfectly healthy niche was dead on exactly this reasoning.

They copied a big account’s approach, got nothing, and drew the obvious conclusion — when what had actually happened was that they had taken a strategy that depends on an audience and run it without one.

Building the real list, in twenty minutes

The method is deliberately mechanical, because the whole problem is that the intuitive version is contaminated by who you happen to have noticed.

1. Write down the five to eight phrases you most want to be found for. Real phrases people type, not descriptions of your niche. If you are not sure, how to do Pinterest keyword research is the prerequisite.
2. Search each one on Pinterest, logged out, in a private window. Logged in gives you personalised results, which is your own history reflected back at you.
3. For each search, note the accounts behind the top ten or so pins. Not the pins — the accounts.
4. Tally them. Any account appearing across three or more of your phrases is a genuine competitor.
5. Take the top four. That is the list. Everybody else, including the big account, comes off it.

The tally step is what makes this work.

An account that ranks for one of your phrases got lucky or is adjacent; an account ranking for four is systematically doing what you want to do, and that is a pattern worth reading.

The surprises this throws up

Two things happen almost every time somebody does this properly for the first time, and both are useful.

The first is that accounts they had never heard of dominate the list.

Small, unglamorous, often ugly accounts that are quietly ranking for everything.

These are the interesting ones — no distribution advantage, so whatever is working is working on the merits, which means it might work for you too.

The second is that the account they were most worried about does not appear at all.

It turns out to rank for a set of phrases adjacent to theirs, aimed at a slightly different reader.

Not a competitor.

Possibly not even a neighbour.

Eight months of quiet anxiety, resolved by twenty minutes of searching.

What about accounts outside your niche?

They count if they rank for your phrases, and this catches people out.

A large general lifestyle account with one very strong board about small kitchens is competing with you on small kitchens, whatever the rest of their profile is about.

Conversely, a dedicated small-kitchen account that never surfaces for your phrases is not competing with you at all, however much it looks like it should be.

The unit of competition on Pinterest is the query, not the account.

That single reframing makes most of this subject straightforward, and it is why what a competitor’s board list tells you is more useful than their follower count will ever be.

The bit the browser cannot do

Everything above is free and worth doing.

Here is where it stops.

Searching logged out gives you a ranking, but not a volume — you cannot tell whether the phrase you just searched is typed a thousand times a month or eleven.

So it is entirely possible to build a rigorous competitor list around a phrase almost nobody searches, and then spend six months winning it.

That is the number PinPinterest exists to supply: real demand behind each phrase, how contested it is, and which pins win it across the platform rather than in one search you happened to run on a Tuesday.

Ten minutes there stops the twenty minutes above from being aimed at the wrong five phrases, which is the failure mode that costs the most.

Keeping the list honest

Two habits stop the list drifting back into a list of accounts you have feelings about, which is where it wants to go.

The first is to rebuild it rather than edit it.

Every six months, run the searches again from scratch and see who comes out.

Do not start from last time’s list and adjust — you will keep the ones you have grown attached to and quietly ignore the newcomer who has overtaken you both.

A fresh build takes the same twenty minutes and gives you a genuine answer.

The second is to write down what changed.

If an account has dropped off the list, that is worth thirty seconds of thought: did they stop publishing, did they pivot, or did somebody displace them?

Any of those three is useful, and all of them are invisible if you only ever look at today’s snapshot.

One more thing worth noticing on a rebuild: whether you now appear for any of your own phrases.

That is the only benchmark in this whole exercise that means anything, and it is far more informative than comparing follower counts with somebody who has been going three years longer.

Honest benchmarks by account size is the sober version of what to expect.

How many is the right number

Four.

Possibly three.

Not ten.

The reason is not effort, it is signal.

With three or four accounts you can hold the whole picture in your head, and a pattern that shows up across all of them is genuinely a pattern.

With ten, everything shows up somewhere — you will find an account doing every conceivable thing, and the list stops discriminating between what works and what somebody tried once.

The whole value of the tally step is that it is selective.

Ten accounts is the tally step undone.

Once you have your four, how to study them is the running order, and finding their best keywords is the first thing I would do with the list.

The account I spent 2023 worrying about, incidentally, turned out to rank for nothing I cared about.

I still follow them.

They are very good.

They were simply never the problem, and I would have known that eight months earlier for the cost of one afternoon.