How to Promote an App on Pinterest: A Guide for App Founders

Here is how to promote an app on Pinterest: open a free business account, make vertical 2:3 Pins (1000 by 1500 pixels) with the phrase people search for in the title, link each Pin to your App Store page with a campaign link, and save the Pins to boards named after those same searches. It works best for apps people plan with, such as recipes, budgets, workouts, study and travel. It works poorly for developer tools and B2B software. Give it months before you judge it.

Everything below was checked against Pinterest's own help pages, Apple's documentation and published research in October 2026. If you are still deciding between networks, start with the comparison of the best social media platform for app promotion.

Why Pinterest marketing for apps works differently

On most social networks a post is seen for a short while and then sinks down the feed. Pinterest is closer to a search engine with pictures. People type what they want to do, scroll the results and save the ones worth keeping. Pinterest's audience page says 96% of its top searches are unbranded, which means the searcher has not chosen a product yet. A small app can show up next to a famous one.

Who uses Pinterest

• Size: 640 million monthly active users worldwide in the second quarter of 2026, up 11% in a year. Of those, 106 million are in the U.S. and Canada.
• Share of U.S. adults: 36% in the 2024 survey shown in Pew Research Center's fact sheet. Pew did not ask about Pinterest in 2025.
• Gender: women were far more likely to use it than men, 50% compared with 19%, in Pew's 2023 survey.
• Age: Pinterest says Gen Z is its fastest growing audience and now half of its global users, and that their main reason for using it is to find information about products or brands.

How long a Pin keeps working

Pinterest does not publish a lifespan for a Pin, so the best evidence is a study by Tailwind, a scheduling tool for Pinterest. Tailwind analyzed more than 1.2 million Pins from over 17,000 accounts across 90 days in 2024, with paid Pins removed. Over 60% of the saves on Pins that link to a website came from Pins more than a year old, and over 40% came from Pins more than two years old.

The same study has a sobering half. Among new Pins, the top 1% collected more than half of all impressions and clicks, and the bottom 80% shared less than a tenth. So most Pins do very little, a few keep working for years, and you cannot tell which is which on the day you post. That is the trade you accept with Pinterest.

Is Pinterest good for marketing your app?

It depends on whether people search Pinterest for the thing your app helps with. The quick test takes five minutes: type three phrases your users would type into the Pinterest search bar and look at what comes back. If the results are full of saved ideas, checklists and plans, there is demand you can serve.

When Pinterest is a waste of time

• Your users are mostly men in technical jobs. Only 19% of U.S. men said they use Pinterest in Pew's 2023 survey.
• You need installs this month. A new account with new Pins takes time to be found, and the Tailwind data shows most of the return arrives late.
• Your app has nothing to show or teach in a picture. A Pin has to be worth saving without installing anything.
• You hoped to buy app installs directly. Pinterest's campaign objectives list five goals as of October 2026 (brand awareness, video completion, consideration, leads and sales) and none is app installs.
• You will not post again after the first week. Ten Pins rarely find the one that works.

How to use Pinterest for business: set up the account

A Pinterest business account is free. It adds Pinterest Analytics, the Business Hub and access to ads, and you can convert back to a personal account at any time.

1. On a computer, go to Pinterest, click Sign up, then Create a business account. Use an email that is not attached to a personal Pinterest account. If you already have a personal account with boards worth keeping, convert it from Settings, under Account management.
2. Name the profile with the app name plus what it does, for example your app name followed by "weekly meal planner app". Use the app icon as the profile image so it matches the App Store.
3. Write a one sentence description that contains the main phrase people search for.
4. If the app has a website, claim it by adding an HTML tag, uploading an HTML file or adding a DNS TXT record (the DNS route can take up to 72 hours). Pinterest lists a fourth route, a Google Merchant Center connection, which is meant for shops. After that, your profile picture appears on Pins saved from your site. You can only claim a domain you own and can edit, so an App Store page cannot be claimed.
5. Create five boards before your first Pin. Name each one after a search, such as "Meal prep for beginners" or "Cheap family dinners". Avoid clever names nobody types.

Pinterest business account setup: what to fill in

Two things on Pinterest's business account page are easy to miss. A new business account can only be created in a desktop browser, although converting a personal account also works in the app. And business accounts are always public, so a private personal account has to be switched to public before it can be converted. The setup form then asks you to build a profile, describe your business and say whether you want to run ads.

Pinterest Pin size and specs

The numbers below come from Pinterest's product specs and related help pages. The best Pinterest Pin size is 1000 by 1500 pixels, a 2:3 ratio.

One detail to watch: Pinterest's creative best practices page gives the description limit as 500 characters, while the specs page says 800. Staying under 500 satisfies both.

The 4:5 image you make for Instagram (1080 by 1350) can be uploaded as a Pin, but it fills less of the screen than a 2:3 Pin. For Pins you want to rank in search, make the taller version. Sizes for every network are in the social media image sizes guide, and a Pinterest Pin generator handles the layout if you would rather skip the design work.

Pinterest Pin formats an app can use for free

Pinterest's spec page is written for advertisers, but it also marks which formats can be published as ordinary unpaid Pins. These four are the ones an app is likely to consider, and the first three are the useful ones.

Three details from the same page save a redesign later. Pinterest converts every upload to an 8 bit RGB JPEG and recommends uploading PNG files in sRGB so quality is not lost. Custom color profiles are not supported, which means a brand color can shift slightly. And in the home feed a Pin with a white or near white background gets a faint black layer (4% opacity) in light mode, while a black one gets a faint white layer (10% opacity) in dark mode. Pure white and pure black never look quite pure there, so check your Pin in the app after it publishes.

Rich Pins pull extra details from your website into a Pin automatically. Pinterest lists three types as of October 2026: recipe, article and product. There is no app type, so an app benefits only through its website. A recipe app with recipe pages on the web, or a blog with articles, can add the markup and have Pin titles and descriptions follow the site, with changes taking up to 24 hours to sync. One more field on the Pin form matters in 2026: if AI made or changed the image, Pinterest provides toggles to mark the Pin as AI modified.

How to lay out the Pin

Pinterest's creative guidance for ads is a sound layout for any Pin: keep the main visual in the middle, put the key message as text on the image near the top, and place extra detail at the bottom. Your logo or app name should be clearly visible without taking over. For an app, the visual is usually one screen that shows the result, cropped so the important part is readable on a phone. The principles behind this are covered in what makes a good social media post.

Pinterest SEO basics: keywords, titles and boards

Pinterest SEO means telling Pinterest, in words, what each Pin is about, so it can match the Pin to a search. The picture gets the save. The words get the Pin in front of the right person.

How Pinterest decides which Pins to show

Pinterest describes its own matching in a guide to discoverability for creators, published in June 2025. It names four elements. Relevance: a descriptive title, clear details and strong keywords in the description, and an image that reflects the content. Uniqueness: original ideas and images that are new to Pinterest are given more visibility. Content quality: sharp visuals and links that work. Engagement: saves, clicks, comments and shares. The guide also says Pins are matched with people beyond your followers, which is why a new account with no audience can still be found.

Two consequences follow for an app. A Pin is matched on its words and its picture together, so a good looking screenshot under a vague title does not appear in search. And repeating one image does not count as new, so each attempt at a topic needs its own picture or headline.

Find Pinterest SEO keywords, step by step

1. Write down five goals your users have, in their words. For a meal planner: plan dinners for the week, eat cheaply, meal prep on Sunday, feed picky kids, use up leftovers. Goals matter more than the category name ("meal planner app"), because most top searches on Pinterest are unbranded.
2. Type each goal into the Pinterest search bar and copy the suggestions that drop down. These are phrases people really use.
3. Open Pinterest Trends from the Analyze performance menu of your business account. Pinterest's help page says the tool runs in a desktop or mobile browser and not in the app. Choose your region first, since the data changes with it.
4. Search each phrase. Trends shows up to two years of search interest, indexed from 0 to 100. The index is a ratio and not a count of searches, so use it to compare phrases and to see when interest rises.
5. Compare up to four phrases on one graph and keep the strongest. Trends also labels whether a phrase is seasonal and shows its weekly, monthly and yearly change. For seasonal topics, note when interest starts to climb and publish before that point.
6. Scroll down. Related trends suggests phrases you had not thought of, Demographics gives the age and gender split of the people searching, and Popular Pins shows what currently wins for the phrase. Note what the top images have in common: a checklist, a photo, numbered steps.
7. Finish with ten phrases. Give each one its own Pin and decide which board it will be saved to.

Where the keywords go

1. Pin title: put the main phrase in the first 40 characters, since that is the part likely to show in feeds.
2. Text on the image: repeat the promise in five to eight large words. Someone scrolling results reads the image before the title.
3. Description: two or three plain sentences using the main phrase once and a couple of related ones. Pinterest uses the description to judge relevance even though it is hidden in feeds.
4. Board name and board description: save the Pin first to the board whose name matches the phrase most closely.
5. Tagged topics: pick the closest topics from the list, up to 10.
6. Alt text: describe what is in the picture for people using a screen reader. Write it for them, not for ranking.

Make one Pin per search phrase. Avoid uploading the same image again and again: the Tailwind study advises against repeating an identical Pin and suggests changing the image or the copy when you want a second attempt at a topic.

A worked example: one Pin with every field filled in

Here is one keyword Pin for Platewise, an invented meal planning app, aimed at the search "weekly meal plan on a budget". The app name appears once, late, and the search phrase appears in every field that Pinterest reads.

Pinterest boards: names, descriptions and covers

A board is a second place for keywords. Pinterest's page on editing a board lists four things you can change: the name, the description, the cover and a header image. Put the search phrase in the name and use the description for two sentences that include related phrases. Pinterest's discoverability guide also recommends refreshing existing boards by adding new Pins regularly, so five active boards serve you better than twenty abandoned ones.

Skip the board named after your app. Nobody searches for an app they have never heard of. If you want update and review Pins kept together, call the board something a person might type, such as "Meal planning app updates".

How to promote an app on Pinterest: 12 Pin formats that work

A Pin has to be useful to someone who has never heard of your app. Lead with the outcome and let the app appear as the way to get it. These twelve formats work for most consumer apps.

1. Use case Pin: one goal in the headline ("Plan 7 dinners in 10 minutes") above the screen that delivers it.
2. Three step how to: three numbered steps with a small screenshot for each.
3. Checklist: a list people would save anyway, such as a packing list or a weekly cleaning routine, with the app named at the bottom.
4. Template preview: a budget layout, study schedule or workout split that the app fills in for you.
5. Before and after: the messy spreadsheet next to the clean app screen.
6. Single feature Pin: one feature, one benefit, one screen. Never a feature list.
7. App update Pin: what is new in this version, in two or three points. See these app update announcement examples.
8. Review Pin: a short quote from a 5 star review. Apple allows reviews in marketing only if the reviewer gives permission, so ask first.
9. Rating milestone Pin: "4.8 stars from 1,000 ratings". The same Apple page allows your rating in marketing as long as it reflects the current rating.
10. Seasonal Pin: New Year budget reset, back to school study plan, summer trip packing. Time it with Pinterest Trends.
11. Roundup Pin: "5 habits worth tracking in January", where your app is the tracker.
12. Screenshot series: each App Store screenshot rebuilt as its own 2:3 Pin with its own keyword title. The source sizes are in the App Store screenshot sizes guide.

Pinterest Pin ideas for apps, by category

The formats above are shapes. These 27 ideas are subjects, three for each kind of app that does well on Pinterest. Each one is a search people already make, and the app appears as the tool that produced the plan, the chart or the list.

Turn one idea into two or three Pins with different images before you move to the next. You cannot predict which version will be found, and a new image gives the same idea a second chance.

A 30 day Pinterest marketing plan for an app

This plan stays inside Pinterest's own scheduler, which holds 10 Pins at a time and reaches 30 days ahead, and it produces about a dozen Pins in the first month. That is a modest pace on purpose. Hootsuite's guide to posting frequency recommends at least one Pin a week and reports Pinterest's position that quality and relevance matter more than frequency. Pinterest's fundamentals page for creators adds one planning tip: build your content calendar 45 to 60 days ahead.

Do not expect the baseline to impress. In the Tailwind study, Pins between one and two years old collected the most saves per Pin (68 on average in 90 days, against 44 for Pins between 90 days and a year old), so the first month is about building a stock of Pins. Month two repeats days 15 to 30 with the next ten phrases. If you batch other networks too, the method in a month of social content in one afternoon fits around this plan.

Does Pinterest have a Pin limit?

We found no daily cap on Pins in Pinterest's help pages, but Pinterest does set limits a plan should respect. Three come from its own pages.

• Storage. Pinterest's developer documentation on boards and Pins caps an account at 2,000 boards of any type, group boards you did not create included, and 200,000 Pins for personal accounts, secret Pins and your Pins on group boards included. An app account will not come near either number.
• Scheduling. Pinterest's scheduling page lets you schedule one Pin at a time, up to 30 days ahead, with no more than 10 waiting at once. You can upload up to 10 images in one go, and each becomes its own Pin. After a Pin is scheduled you can change its date, title, board, description and link, but not the image or video.
• Spam. The community guidelines covered below treat repetitive content as spam, so the practical limit is how many different, useful Pins you can make. For a small app that is two or three a week, as in the plan above.

How to link a Pin to the App Store

Every Pin has an optional link field, and that is where the App Store address goes. Two choices make the link more useful.

• Use a campaign link. In App Store Connect, under Analytics, Acquisition, Campaigns, you can generate a campaign link with a name of up to 30 characters, for example "pinterest". App Analytics then reports product page views and first time downloads that came through it. A campaign appears after at least 24 hours and once five or more people have downloaded.
• Decide between the App Store and your website. A direct App Store link is one tap shorter. A page on your own site works for Android visitors too, can be claimed so your profile shows on saved Pins, and lets you show more before the install. If you have no website, link straight to the App Store.
• Use Apple's own badge and QR code on the image if you want one. App Store Marketing Tools generates linked badges, QR codes and promotional assets for your app. The rules for using the badge are summarized in the App Store marketing guidelines guide.

Paid Pins have one more option. Mobile deep links can open a specific screen inside your app for people who already have it installed, with a website fallback for everyone else. Pinterest documents these for ads only.

How to promote a Pin on Pinterest

Paying to show a Pin is the quickest way to learn whether a topic sends clicks before you make ten more Pins about it. There are two routes. The new one is a Promote button on the Pin itself: Pinterest announced it on March 24, 2026 as a way to boost a Pin without building a campaign, starting in the U.S., as TechCrunch reported. Pinterest's help page on promoting a Pin says it is rolling out gradually, at first to a small group of U.S. creators and high engagement accounts, so you may not see it yet. The older route, Ads Manager, is open to every business account.

How to promote a Pin with the Promote button

1. Check that the Pin qualifies. The help page says you can only promote Pins you created or uploaded, not repins, and the Pin must have a destination link. For an app, that link is your App Store campaign link, so the promotion's downloads show up in App Store Connect under their own name.
2. On a computer, go to your profile and hover over the Pin, or open it, and select Promote. In the app, open the Pin from your profile and tap Promote.
3. Review the goal, audience, budget and duration that Pinterest fills in, and change them if you need to.
4. Pay. If you have advertised before, your ad account and payment method appear. If not, you enter business details and Pinterest creates the business and ad accounts for you. On iPhone the payment goes through Apple's in app purchase flow, while desktop and Android use the payment method on the ad account.
5. Wait for review. The help page says it can take 6 to 12 hours. After that the Pin runs as an ad, and its stats appear under See more stats on the Pin and in Ads Manager as a campaign named after the Pin and the date.

How much does it cost to promote on Pinterest?

Pinterest sells ads in an auction, so there is no price list: you choose the budget and the auction decides what each click costs. Pinterest's page on campaign budgets describes three kinds. A lifetime budget sets a total for the whole campaign. A fixed daily budget spends the same amount every day. A Performance+ daily budget is an average: on a given day Pinterest tries not to spend more than 125% of it, and over the week from Sunday to Saturday it spends no more than the daily figure on average, so $100 a day can mean $125 on Tuesday and $75 on Wednesday.

The objective decides what you pay for. The same page says Consideration optimizes for Pin clicks or outbound clicks, which suits an app because an outbound click is a visit to your listing. Awareness optimizes for impressions, and Leads and Sales optimize for conversions measured on a website. As the section above on fit explains, none of the objectives is app installs, so judge any paid test by first time downloads on its campaign link, not by Pinterest's own conversion numbers.

Free promotion on Pinterest is the organic route this guide is built around: Pins from a business account carry a link and are shown in search and home feeds at no cost. Paying makes sense only for a Pin that already earns saves and outbound clicks for free, for the same reason a boost does on Instagram: money amplifies a Pin people want, and does nothing for one they skip.

How to get traffic from Pinterest and measure it

Traffic from Pinterest comes from volume, patience and pruning. Plan a month at a time: the scheduler holds up to 10 Pins and reaches 30 days ahead, which works out to two or three new Pins a week. Still images are fine to start with, although Buffer's 2026 format data shows video Pins earning a higher median engagement rate than image Pins (5.75% against 3.15%), so a short screen recording is worth testing later.

Pinterest Analytics reports four numbers per Pin that matter for an app, and its date range goes back a year and a half.

How to check Pinterest Analytics

On desktop, open the menu at the top left and choose Overview under Analytics. In the app, go to your profile and tap the chart icon. The overview covers the last 30 days and lists your top boards and top Pins. Top Pins are sorted by impressions at first. Change the sort to outbound clicks, because that is the list that matters for installs.

Four filters are worth knowing. Date range reaches back a year and a half and can include real time estimates for the last 48 hours. Device splits mobile, desktop and tablet. Source separates the Pins you made from Pins other people saved from your claimed website. Content type separates organic from paid. On desktop, any filtered view can be exported as a CSV file.

Pinterest also reports each number as a rate against impressions. Save rate is saves divided by the number of times your Pins were on screen, and outbound click rate is clicks to your link divided by the same figure. Rates let you compare a Pin with 500 impressions against one with 50,000. One caveat from the help page: outbound clicks are measured from the date the link was added, so add the link before you publish.

Audience Insights, in the same menu, shows the age, gender, location and device of the people who saw or engaged with your Pins in the last 30 days. It also lists the categories they care about, with an affinity score that compares your audience with Pinterest as a whole. If the people you reach are not the people your app is for, change the keywords before you change the design.

What the numbers are telling you

Review once a month. Find the two or three Pins with the most outbound clicks and make new Pins on the same topic with a different image or headline. Stop making Pins on topics that earn impressions but no saves. Judge the channel after three to six months, because early numbers on a new account say little.

Pinterest rules and mistakes that hold an app account back

Pinterest's community guidelines, last updated in May 2026 with a revised version taking effect on November 12, 2026, include a spam section that applies directly to marketing accounts. Five points in it matter for an app.

• Automation has to be approved by Pinterest. Use Pinterest's own scheduler or a tool from its partner list, and stay away from services that save, follow or comment for you.
• Repetitive content made to earn money counts as spam. Twenty near identical Pins of one screenshot is the pattern to avoid.
• Links should hold no surprises. Pinterest says people should be able to anticipate where a link takes them, and that links with excessive redirection, or shorteners abused for spam, may be blocked. A plain App Store address or an Apple campaign link is safe. A chain of tracking redirects is a risk.
• Do not point an old Pin at a new destination. The guidelines list redirecting existing Pins among the tactics they prohibit, so make a new Pin when the link has to change.
• Stuffing irrelevant keywords is named as well. Use phrases that describe the Pin, once in the title and once in the description, in sentences a person would write.

Common Pinterest marketing mistakes for apps

• Posting App Store screenshots unchanged. They were made for a store page and answer no search.
• Titles that open with the app name. The first 40 characters are the part most likely to show, so the search phrase goes there.
• Only square or 4:5 images. They upload fine, but a 2:3 Pin takes more of the screen.
• One board with the app's name on it and everything inside.
• A link added after publishing, which leaves the early outbound clicks uncounted.
• Skipping the campaign link, so downloads from Pinterest cannot be told apart from the rest.
• Watching followers. Pinterest matches Pins to people beyond your followers, so outbound clicks and first time downloads are the numbers to watch.
• Stopping after ten Pins or one month, before any Pin has had time to be found.

Where Spreadcast fits

Spreadcast turns what happens on your App Store listing into posts. You paste your App Store link at the start page, it checks the public listing every day, and a new version, a 5 star review or a rating milestone becomes a designed still image with a caption for each network. Pinterest is one of the eight networks it publishes to. The posts are 1080 by 1350, a little shorter than the 2:3 that Pinterest recommends, so treat them as a steady baseline of update, review and milestone Pins and add taller keyword Pins by hand. Posts that quote a reviewer wait for your approval. Plans start free, and Pro at $29 a month publishes for you, as shown on the pricing page.