How Many Businesses Use Pinterest for Marketing (And What "Using It" Really Means)

The short version: Pinterest says roughly 5 million businesses have set up an account on the platform, but the number posting anything with a purpose behind it is far smaller, probably closer to a few hundred thousand once you strip out abandoned profiles. If you sell something visual, physical, or aspirational, that gap is your opportunity.

Useful alongside this: hootsuite marketing strategy.

The headline number, and why it's almost meaningless

Pinterest has said for years that "more than 5 million businesses" use the platform. That figure gets repeated in every listicle and social media stats roundup without anyone asking a basic question: what counts as using it?

If a florist in Leeds created a business account in 2019, posted six pins that first month, then never logged back in, they're still in that 5 million. So is the freelance copywriter who set up a profile because a course told her to, added a board called "Inspiration," and hasn't touched it since. Pinterest has around 522 million monthly active users globally as of its most recent quarterly reports, and business accounts are a slice of the total account base, not a slice of active marketers.

The honest answer is that nobody, including Pinterest, publishes a clean figure for "businesses actively marketing on Pinterest right now, this month, with intent." What we have instead is a stack of proxy numbers, and once you line them up, a much smaller and more useful picture appears.

What the survey data shows

Third-party marketing surveys, the kind Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Social Media Examiner run every year asking marketers which platforms they use, consistently put Pinterest well behind Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for business use. In most of these surveys Pinterest sits somewhere between 12 and 20 percent of marketers reporting they use it at all, and a smaller subset, usually under 10 percent, saying they post to it weekly.

Compare that to Instagram, which shows up in the 70 to 80 percent range for the same surveys, and you get a sense of scale. Pinterest is a minority platform in most marketing budgets. That's not a criticism of Pinterest, it's a fact about where attention and ad spend currently sit, and it matches what I see across the small businesses I work with: for every ten clients who have Instagram and Facebook running, maybe one or two have a working Pinterest account, and usually it's because they sell something like home décor, weddings, food, or handmade goods.

I read a piece a few years back on why social media marketing remains massively popular and the pattern holds for Pinterest specifically: popularity of the platform among consumers doesn't translate one to one into business adoption, because Pinterest requires a different kind of content than most small businesses are set up to produce.

A client story that sums up the gap

I worked with a jewellery brand two years ago, small team, nice product, decent Instagram following. They'd had a Pinterest business account since 2018. When I asked to see their analytics, the account had 40 pins total, no fresh content in over three years, and a total of 900 followers gathered over that whole period.

We rebuilt it from scratch. Fresh boards organised by occasion (bridesmaid gifts, birthday gifts under fifty pounds, gifts for mums), fresh pin designs matched to each board, and a posting rhythm of five pins a day using a scheduling tool rather than logging in manually. Within four months, Pinterest was sending more monthly website traffic than their Facebook page, and it had cost them roughly two hours a week of one person's time plus the design templates we'd already built for other channels.

That business had technically "used Pinterest for marketing" since 2018 by any survey definition. In reality they'd used it for marketing for four months. The other three and a half years, they were just one of the 5 million accounts padding out Pinterest's own number.

The uncomfortable part nobody likes to say out loud

Here's the bit that gets skipped in most Pinterest guides: for a huge chunk of businesses, Pinterest is not worth the effort, and pushing every business owner toward it because "it's an underused platform" is bad advice.

Pinterest works because it's a visual search engine where people go to plan future purchases and projects, not a social network where people go to chat with brands. If you sell software, professional services, B2B consulting, insurance, accountancy, anything that doesn't photograph well and doesn't fit into someone's Pinterest board of "kitchen renovation ideas" or "outfits for autumn," you will pour hours into pin design and get almost nothing back. I've tested this with two B2B clients myself, both gave it a genuine three-month run with proper pin design and consistent posting, and both saw under 50 clicks a month for their trouble. That's not a strategy failure, that's a platform mismatch.

Where Pinterest earns its place, it earns it hard: home and interiors, fashion and accessories, weddings, food and recipes, DIY and crafts, fitness and wellness content, parenting, and travel. If your business sits in one of those categories and you're not on Pinterest, you're leaving traffic on the table that a competitor is quietly picking up. If your business sits outside those categories, ignore the "why isn't your brand on Pinterest yet" articles. They're written for the platform's benefit, not yours.

Where the real numbers come from, and how to read them

When you're trying to work out whether "businesses like mine" use Pinterest, look at three things instead of the headline account count:

• Pinterest's own advertiser numbers: Pinterest reports advertising revenue and active advertiser growth in its quarterly earnings, and the mix leans heavily toward retail, home goods, and beauty. If your category isn't well represented there, that's a signal.
• Category-specific case studies: sellers on Etsy have some of the highest documented Pinterest conversion rates of any group, largely because handmade and craft products are exactly what Pinterest users are searching for. If you want a working model, look at how Etsy built its marketing strategy around exactly this kind of visual, search-driven discovery.
• Your own site analytics: check Google Analytics for any existing Pinterest referral traffic, even from an inactive account. If people are still finding old pins and clicking through years later, that tells you the platform has an appetite for your content even without effort, which is a strong sign it's worth a real push.

What " using" Pinterest looks like in practice

Based on what I've seen work across clients, a business that's running Pinterest marketing, not just holding an account, is doing something close to this:

• Posting between 5 and 15 pins a day, mostly fresh designs rather than repeats, using a scheduler so it doesn't rely on someone remembering.
• Running at least 10 to 15 active boards organised around what the customer is trying to achieve, not around the company's product categories.
• Writing keyword-rich titles and descriptions for every pin, because Pinterest behaves like a search engine and rewards specific phrasing over clever branding.
• Checking Pinterest Analytics monthly for which pins and boards are driving saves and outbound clicks, and doubling down on the formats that work.
• Running at least a small Pinterest ads budget, often as little as 5 to 10 pounds a day, to push proven organic pins to a wider audience.

Very few businesses do all five of those consistently. That's why the real "active marketer" number is a fraction of the 5 million account figure. My working estimate, based on the survey data plus what I see hands on with clients, is that fewer than 500,000 businesses worldwide are running Pinterest with anything close to that level of consistency at any given time. Everyone else has a dusty account sitting there, technically counted, doing nothing.

If you're deciding whether to bother

Run a proper 90 day test before you decide either way. Set up or clean out your existing account, build eight to ten boards that map to what your customer is searching for rather than what departments your company has, and commit to daily pinning using a scheduling tool so it survives busy weeks. Check traffic and saves at day 30, day 60, and day 90 rather than after a fortnight, because Pinterest content has a long shelf life and often takes months to gain traction, unlike Instagram posts that peak and die within a day or two.

If you're in fashion, look at how clothing businesses build a full marketing strategy around visual platforms, since the same board and pin structure that works for outfits works well for accessories, homeware, and gifts. And if you want to see a documented example of a brand that took Pinterest seriously and built genuine reach from it, the Pinterest marketing strategy breakdown I put together walks through exactly what a working account looks like month by month.

If after 90 days you've got under 100 monthly clicks and no saves worth mentioning, and you're in a category outside home, fashion, food, weddings, or crafts, stop. That's not you failing at Pinterest. That's the platform confirming what the survey data already told you: it's not built for every business, and pretending otherwise wastes time you could spend on a channel your customers use.

If that raises the next question, see How Many Pinterest Users Are There in the UK? Real Numbers for 2026.

Frequently asked questions

How many businesses use Pinterest for marketing?

Pinterest reports around 5 million business accounts exist on the platform, but survey data on active marketer behaviour suggests only 12 to 20 percent of marketers use Pinterest at all, and far fewer, likely under 10 percent, post to it consistently. A realistic estimate of businesses actively marketing on Pinterest, rather than just holding a dormant account, is well under 1 million worldwide.

What percentage of small businesses use Pinterest?

Small business adoption tracks the general marketer surveys, usually in the 10 to 20 percent range, but adoption is heavily skewed toward a handful of categories: home and interiors, fashion, food, weddings, and crafts. Small businesses outside those categories rarely use Pinterest for marketing because the platform's search and discovery behaviour doesn't fit non-visual products or services.

Is Pinterest worth it for a small business in 2026?

It depends entirely on what you sell. If your product is visual and fits how people plan purchases (weddings, renovations, outfits, recipes, gifts), Pinterest can send steady, long-lasting traffic for a modest time investment. If you sell B2B services or anything that doesn't photograph or plan well, most businesses see very low returns and are better off putting that effort into a channel their customers browse.

Why do so many businesses have a Pinterest account but never post?

Most business owners set up a Pinterest account early on because a marketing guide told them to be "everywhere," then never built the habit of daily pinning because it feels less urgent than Instagram or email. Without a scheduling routine, the account quietly goes dormant while still counting toward Pinterest's total business account figures, which is why the headline numbers overstate how many businesses are using the platform.

Further reading

• Pinterest's Help Centre