How to Organize Your Pinterest Boards

I recently posted a guide on how to use Pinterest for absolute beginners. If you’ve been using Pinterest for a while, then this post about how to organize your Pinboards is for you!

 

Tips and tricks to help you manage your pins and keep track of projects, recipes, decor and more. Learn how to organize your Pinterest boards to easily pin new items and easily find things you've already pinned.

Why You Should Organize Your Pinterest Pinboards?

First thing first, why should you even care if your pinboards are organized?

First, it helps you to be able to find what you have pinned. If you just pin everything to one or two huge boards, it’s very tough to go back and find something specific. After all the point of Pinterest is to inspire you to actually do, make, and try things you find there. (Yes, I forget that sometimes, too).

Second, if you name your boards well, it will really help you to be able to pin to correct board more quickly and easily. (I’ll explain more about this later.)

Third, by organizing your boards, you will really help others to find you, your boards, and your pins. This is especially important if you are intentionally trying to grow your Pinterest followers, but even if you don’t care much about that, it’s still doesn’t hurt to make it easier for everyone on Pinterest to find what they are looking for.

Pinboard Organization Strategy

Now that we covered the why, let’s talk about the strategy for organizing your boards. How should you title them? How many should you have? Should you have large, broad categories (like “Recipes”) or more specific categories (like “Chicken Recipes”). Last, I’ll cover the actual mechanics of how to go about creating boards, renaming boards, deleting pins, and moving pins, so don’t worry about that yet.

  1. Determine the broad categories of things you pin, and write them all down. Here’s mine: Home, Recipes, Planners & Printables, Books, Baby/Kids, Books, Completed Pins, DIY, Fashion, Graphic Design, Healthy Living, Holidays, Photography, Quotes, and Tips and Tricks.
  2. Now that you have all your broad categories, decide where you’d like to break some of those categories down into more specific boards. If you pin tons of things in one category, it probably makes sense to break it down some. For example, I love to cook and bake and pin tons of recipes. Therefore, I’ve broken my recipes down into healthy, dessert, tried and true, chicken, chocolate, cupcakes, general, and lemon. However, I’m not all that into to fashion and clothes so I just have one general fashion board. If you’re really into fashion, you’d probably want to break your fashion category into several different segments (work outfits, casual outfits, dressy outfits, etc.)
  3. Do not fear having too many boards. There’s no limit, and I have seen people with tons. If you really have a lot of pins, it really does make a lot of sense to have a lot of boards.
  4. This step is key for me! If you have quite a few boards you’ll want to find them easily when you’re pinning. When you pin, your board selections appear with the board you last pinned to first, followed by all your other boards in alphabetical order. (Note: The way your boards are arranged under your profile has nothing to do with the order they appear in this dropdown menu when pinning. This dropdown will always be in alphabetical order.) Therefore, you should name your boards by starting with the broad category, then putting a separator like dash, period, or parentheses, followed by the more specific category. For example, my board for chocolate recipes is named “Recipes – Chocolate” and NOT “Chocolate Recipes.” See the picture below.Capture
  5. Create new boards as needed and rename existing boards as needed, and start pinning to the correct boards from this point forward. I would strongly encourage not too worry too much about reorganizing pins you already have. Choose how you want to organize things from this point forward, and it’s okay if you never go back and “fix” the things you’ve already pinned. You will be so much better off if you just start now.

    Logistics of How to Arrange Your Boards and Pins

  • You can create new pinboards like I showed you in this post.
  • You can rename existing pinboards. To do so, click on your name in the upper right corner to see all your boards. Click on the board you want to rename. Then click on “Edit Board” below the title. There you can change the title and the description.Capture
  • From what I understand, if someone has followed you and you create a new board, they are following that board as well.
  • You can move a pin, although it’s cumbersome. Go to the pin and hover your mouse over it, and then click the “edit” button. Capture3
    You’ll come to a screen like this where you can change the board that it is pinned to:

Capture5

After changing the board, make sure you click on “Save Pin.”

  • If you delete a pin altogether, it will still be there on the boards of those who repinned it. You won’t mess anything up for them.
  • I mentioned this earlier but the set up of your boards on your profile defaults to the order they were created, I believe. You can rearrange these boards however you would like. I arranged mine mostly in alphabetical order, except my most popular boards are at the very top and my group boards are at the bottom.
    Here some examples of pinners with well organized boards for inspiration:

Yours Truly

    – Obviously, I followed my own rules.

Amanda Fles

    – I really like how she has named many of her boards with a major category and a subcategory.

Beverly Berthold

    – She is really, really into rubber stamping and card making, so she has tons of boards with card examples. I like how she started each of those boards with a number (01 through 22). That’s another way to control how how they show up in the dropdown menu when you pin.

Hope that gives you some organizing ideas. Leave your questions or pinboard organizing ideas in the comments below, and pin this post to your newly organized boards if you found it helpful.

Posted Under: Organizing