Sometimes it’s really hard to think about the next season when it comes to content. I mean, who wants to think about Christmas when you’re sitting in the sun drinking margaritas on your favorite beach? But the truth is, if Pinterest is your main source of traffic, you have to stay ahead of the seasons in order for your pins to be available when the seasonal searches start.

But wait, how early? How do I know when the seasonal searches start? Sometimes figuring this out can feel like you’re doing time-zone math (if you’ve ever tried to manually schedule a zoom call with someone far away, you know what I’m talking about). Let’s talk about how to figure out when you need to post seasonal content!

The first step to figure out when searches start happening for your topic. Let’s take Christmas for example. Based on the data collected by Pinterest, we can see that Christmas

related searches started in early October! This makes sense because Christmas merchandise starts rolling out in early October for some stores. You can find this data at trends.pinterest.com . It’s pretty fascinating, or maybe I’m just a Pinterest nerd, you decide.

If you can’t find data on a specific trend, you can always look at your own account and see when your content started getting traffic for certain holidays/seasons. Search for your past seasonal pins and collect traffic data from them. This works for your sales too! Check to see when your seasonal sales start, and then move on to the next step.

Now that we know searches start in October (and generally last until the week of Christmas) Step 2 is to figure out when to pin. Generally speaking, I tell people to push their content out 2 months early. On one account, I started pinning their Christmas related content at the very end of July. They indexed and started getting engagement by September, and once Christmas “search-season” rolled around, they were readily available and became the driving force of that account, bringing in the majority of website clicks all through the holidays.

So let’s do the math. Find the month people start searching for inspiration for that holiday or season. Then back up the calendar 2 months. That’s when you should start pushing out pins. Does this take some planning? You bet! But it’s worth it.

What happens if you miss your window? Good news! With Pinterest, pins don’t die off in a day like social media posts. So your pins should still be around for next year, as long as you used great keywords!

Need help keeping up with what to pin when? Go follow me on Instagram (@pinprostudio). I try to keep my followers up to date on when trends start peaking, when to pin seasonal content, Pinterest updates and more. Or just come say Hi! I’d love that too!

Happy Pinning,

Sarah