How many pins a day should a food blogger post?
Between three and ten fresh pins a day, every day, is the range that keeps a recipe catalog in front of readers without looking like a bot; the exact number is your catalog size divided by how often you want each recipe to come back round.
Pinterest does not publish a number, and the people who quote one with confidence are usually quoting each other. What Pinterest has said, consistently, is that it prefers a steady supply of fresh pins over bursts, and that saving the same thing repeatedly in a short window looks like spam. Everything useful follows from those two facts and from the size of your catalog.
Start from the catalog, not the calendar
Suppose you have 400 recipes. If you post four fresh pins a day, every recipe gets a new pin once every hundred days, which is roughly once a season. That is the cycle: catalog size divided by pins a day.
| Catalog | 3 a day | 5 a day | 10 a day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 150 recipes | 50 days | 30 days | 15 days |
| 400 recipes | 133 days | 80 days | 40 days |
| 1,000 recipes | 333 days | 200 days | 100 days |
A cycle of about a season, 80 to 120 days, is the one we aim for. Each recipe gets a fresh look as its season comes round, and no recipe is pinned so often that the looks start to repeat. A small catalog on ten a day cycles every two weeks, which is more than Pinterest needs and more than the readers need. A large catalog on three a day takes a year to come round, which means the pumpkin recipes get their pin in March.
So: pick the pins a day that gives your catalog a cycle of about a season. For most food blogs that is between three and ten.
Why not more
Past a point, more pins a day stops adding readers and starts adding risk. Three reasons.
Pinterest's spam filters watch velocity. An account that goes from two pins a day to forty is behaving like a bot, and it gets treated like one. The pins stop being distributed, and nothing tells you.
The looks run out. Ten fresh pins a day for a 150-recipe catalog means each recipe needs a new look every two weeks. By the fourth round the "new" looks are the same photo in slightly different frames, and Pinterest's image matching is good enough to notice.
You stop reviewing. Whatever makes the pins, you should see each one before it posts. Nobody reviews forty pins a day for long. At that point the tool is posting on its own, and tools that post on their own are how accounts get flagged.
Steadiness over size
Five a day for a year is 1,825 pins and a catalog that has been covered four times. Fifty on Sundays is 2,600 pins, one unhappy spam filter, and six empty days a week in which Pinterest has nothing new from you to show. The first account wins, and not narrowly.
If you can only manage one thing, manage the steadiness. Schedule the week on Monday and let the days post themselves.
In season counts double
The cycle is an average. A rotation that lifts in-season recipes to the front and lets the January soups wait until autumn gives each pin a much better chance of landing when readers are searching for it. The pumpkin bread that gets its fresh pin in late August does more than the one that gets it in March, with the same effort.
What we actually do
Three sites, roughly two thousand recipes between them, pinned at a steady daily number per site sized to give each catalog a cycle of about a season, in-season recipes first, longest-since-pinned next. Each recipe gets a few looks when it comes round; the ones approved go to different boards on different days.
Mary and Karl to fill in: the actual pins a day on each site, and how long the Monday approving takes.