Reorganising (or reorganizing if you’re visiting my site from America!) your Pinterest boards is a huge task. But it’s well worth it and you can get a lot of value out of it.
Reorganising your boards is a task that can take a long time – you can set aside an entire day for this or do it slowly over a number of days. In reorganising my boards for this blog, I also wanted to transfer a lot of content from my personal Pinterest account to my blog one, so I had two tasks in one.
Create your goal
What do you want to do with Pinterest? Curate information? Drive traffic to your site? Enjoy the memes? Be specific in your goals. This post has great tips for using Pinterest.
Take Note of What You Have Now
I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I did this by grabbing a notebook and pen (yep, I’m old school sometimes) and writing down the topics of the boards on both my personal and blog accounts. This step is important to make sure you don’t miss anything, and to make sure you’re organised for the next step.
Create Specific Boards
The best piece of information I’ve ever gotten on using Pinterest (from the site I linked to above) is to be very specific with your boards. For example, I split my “Parties” board into:
- Parties: Food
- Parties: Decorations
- Parties: Drinks
- Parties: Great Ideas
- Parties: Entertainment
- Parties: Seating
As far as I know, there is no advantage to any particular way of dividing your boards. Colons, forward slashes and hyphens are all ways to divide up your board name into specific topics.
Edit the Pins
Always use the ‘edit’ button when moving pins. If you repin them to a new board, you’ll end up flooding your followers feeds with your pins. That’s a bit too risky and you could lose followers.
If you have a lot of pins, edit the boards one by one. It sounds silly to read, but you’ll want to save on how much you have to scroll. Using the example from above, I went to my “Parties” board and edited from the top, moving the pins to their new, more specific boards.
Does your Pinterest need some help? I can help you with that help!
Leave Space to Expand
As great as it is to be specific, your blog and online presence will change and evolve over time. Leave a generic board (perhaps your original board) for the expansion of ideas or tangents that don’t yet need their own board. Secret boards are great for secret projects, and since you only get a few of them, you shouldn’t “waste” one on generic stuff.
Other Tips:
- If you need to repin, as I did to move things from my personal to blog account, you are likely to flood your feed with pins. (An unexpected benefit of this was a chunk of new followers – but I don’t know how many people I annoyed at the same time.)
- Warn users you may follow on other social media accounts that you will be moving boards around.
- Repin only from other accounts – edit from your own account. The only exception to this is repinning selected pins that draw good traffic to your blog.
- What I pin is wider than what I blog about because I have a lot of interests. Depending on your niche and/or strategy this may not work well for you.
- Make sure your newly created specific boards have at least five pins on them so they don’t look ’empty’.
You can follow me on Pinterest here – feel free to leave a link in the comments to your Pinterest account.
Have you ever reorganised your Pinterest boards? Do you have any tips you can share?
I went through a major clean up of my pinterest boards last year. It was a long arduous process. I remember I was so excited when pinterest first came out that I was pinning and hoarding everything, but not really organising stuff properly. From then on I decided to be more open to creating a new pinterest board if a pin doesn’t really go anywhere instead of just shoving it on the next best board I can think of.
Yes – it’s much easier to have too many boards than not enough! At least that way you can easily find what you’re looking for. What’s your Pinterest username?
Thanks for posting these tips, Vanessa! TBH, I do get sick of seeing the same user pinning up my feed, but I hadn’t thought of all the nights I can’t sleep and repinning a gazillion pins might annoy MY followers.
Have you found any way to schedule your pins?
I’m prone to pinning bad jokes if I’m awake at night!
There are a few tools to schedule pins, I think Viral Tag was one? But I’ve never tried any of them so I’m not sure how well they work or if they cost to use. I’m pretty sure they’re all third party though, there’s no native way to schedule in Pinterest.
I like your idea of being more specific and spliting e.g. parties into a few different boards. Cleaning up my pinterest boards hasn’t even crossed my mind though, I just don’t think I’d have the time!
It is a time consuming thing! I did most of my splitting in one hit then finished the rest of it off bit by bit over a few weeks. You can always just start more specific boards and pin to them now, leaving splitting the other ones for some other time (or never).
I will be adding this to my To Do list. I am a random pinner and could do with thinking about what I actually want Pinterest to do for me.
It’s time consuming but worth it!
Thanks so much Vanessa! I am only just getting into Pinterest and have saved your post for future reference 🙂
Hopefully this is a good one for you to read while you start – then you won’t have to reorganise, you’ll just have been all slick & organised from the start 🙂
[…] relevant things from my personal account to my blog one. I wrote a bit about how to do this here. Because I found it too hard to maintain a personal and a blog Pinterest account, I pin on a wide […]