Kate Ahl (0:00)

Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pin podcast. I want to start with a story. So there's a podcast that I listen to and at the end of every podcast they have this section that says, not worth your time, question mark. And I thought about that this morning as I was diving in to record this episode about board sections. Board sections have been one of those things that I would have put at the end of an episode when I with a question mark, not worth your time. And most often I would have answered, it is not worth your time. But as all platforms change and iterate to become something new and different and fresh for the users that use it, Pinterest board sections is one of those things that has changed. Now I hear the tires like screeching to a halt in your brain, like what? You have always said that Pinterest board sections don't matter. And you're right. I have until this month. So I am an educator with Pinterest. I have been fortunate enough to be on the educator team. There are six of us on this team and I have created this episode in partnership with Pinterest. And the reason I say that is not only do I have to disclose that, but number two, the only way to pull off this episode was to create it in partnership with Pinterest because I had so many questions. So this episode, I want to tell you right now, it's a. It's going to be a longer one, but it's also going to be one where I reference my notes a little bit more than I normally do. Now, if you listen to the podcast, you don't know that because you don't see my face. But if you are watching on Instagram, I just want you to know I am going to look down because I have eight pages of notes. I have probably spent more time on this podcast than any other podcast I have done in the past. And I have nine years of podcasts under my belt. This one has taken me at least six hours to prepare for, hence the eight pages of notes. So why did I take that long one? I want to curate the best and most accurate information for you. I understand that the words that come out of my mouth and the things that I share and can either lead you down a path that is not fruitful or lead you down a path that is very fruitful and productive for your business. I take great responsibility for the words that I share because I don't want to go down that first path. And I know you don't want to go down that first path. So if I share something, I want it to be factual, I want it to be helpful, and I also want it to be, well, it's kind of like factual accurate. Right? So this episode is essentially the complete guide to Pinterest board sections. And yes, things have changed. So with that, we're gonna dive in. You're listening to the Simple Pen podcast, Pinterest, for business advice that goes down smooth and easy. Here's your host, Kate all okay, first, before we get into the nitty gritty, the Pinterest team has been incredibly helpful. I have gotten answers from the person on their team that is the expert in boards. And I consider that to be a great privilege and honor. And I went back and forth tremendously on some questions that I had because I wanted to make sure that I was understanding it correctly. So Pinterest board sections, what started this discussion and actually me choosing to dive into this was that there was a beginner webinar that Pinterest that had hosted, and in that webinar there was a phrase that was used that said the best practice is to keep pins in boards and sections limited to 20 to 100 pins. So I'm going to read that again. It's best practice to keep pins in boards and sections limited to 20 to 100 pins. Now, in all my years of doing Pinterest marketing, 11 years with simple pin media and a couple years even before that, I've never heard Pinterest be so specific. So I had to go back and say, why do we need to keep pins on the board so limited? Don't people on Pinterest have thousands and thousands and thousands of pins on their boards? So here's what Pinterest said about that specificity in the numbers. Since most people use Pinterest on their phones, they are likely to scroll three to four times before tapping on something and moving on. Keeping the number of pins on your boards to 20 to 100 within a border section maximizes the visibility of pins within a board. Top performing boards are within this threshold. As you can imagine, this opened a black hole in my mind and I had more questions. We are going to go through the what, the why, the how, and the details of board sections. So first, understanding Pinterest boards. So Pinterest boards, especially for those of you who are new, the best way that I can describe these are they live on your profile or your page. Sometimes the terms are used interchangeably. And I'm a Gen Xer, I'm a little bit old. I know Gen Z is the fastest growing demographic. So if you're Gen Z, this will not be relatable to you at all. But for those of us who are a little bit older, we used to collect magazines, and before the digital age, we would take out a page and we would put it into a binder that had a section. And this is a very similar concept to a board. You find something that you're interested in and you save it to your board for. For later. That is a typical user or pinner habit. On Pinterest, I am pinning a lot of stuff about the garden and my backyard patio. I actually have a backyard board with two sections in it, Backyard patio and garden ideas. So I can then start to categorize how it is I'm organizing my pins. Okay, so they're just a collection of pins, saved images with links, or saved links that have images. They definitively increase the visibility of your content and your products. Here's a great stat for you. 25% of Pinterest SEO traffic goes to boards. That's really pretty significant. So inside those boards are what we call board sections. The topic of today's podcast sections are inside them. Sections are a feature that allows you to further organize your boards so you can have as many sections as you want. I never saw a cap on those or a limit. You could organize them. I would kind of, if I was going to put this into practice, and this is me saying this, I would limit them to the 3 to 4 scroll idea. You don't want to put 500 sections in a board. I would end up capping them somewhere around 20. And that's mostly because of the scrolling piece of the section. And then you scroll of the pins, if that makes sense. So, for example, if you have a home decor board, you might have living room, kitchen, bathroom, remodel, all of those things as sections. So again, it helps users better organize their content, but it helps the user engage with our content in a better organized way. So instead of scrolling through hundreds and thousands of pins, you can navigate directly to a section that has a limited number of pins. Now, the practicality of this makes sense, right? Those of us who have been on Pinterest for a while, whether as a marketer or as a user, you're not scrolling through a board with more than 500 pins or a thousand pins, like that would be so impractical. So actually using these guardrails of 20 to 100 pins makes a lot of sense. So why, why do you want to use board sections outside of maybe be more organized or allowing people to Scroll a little deeper. We use board sections because it creates a great user experience. It creates another level of organization, and it holds the SEO optimization inside that board. That not only makes it really easy for the user to get what they're looking for, but it also helps the algorithm understand what it is your board and your sections are about. A lot of people might ask, okay, if we have this hundred pin rule within the boards, within the sections. I thought people rarely visited boards. I thought they weren't really something that people pursued after. Right. So people are operating in the home feed or they're searching. So the first engagement that they have is with an actual pin, not a board. Well, if you have been using Pinterest on your app lately, what you will notice is that when you search, right there at the top are boards and then pins. And so Pinterest is prioritizing, putting boards in search as well, which increases the chances that people are going to engage with your pins. That's a new development. So it's important to put emphasis on boards, especially with 25% of the SEO value going towards boards. Number two. What do you do if you already have thousands and thousands of pins in a particular board? Are you supposed to go back and organize it all? No, you're not. But here's great guidance from Pinterest. Start by going forward with organizing within sections how you want them to be organized. Don't go back, but begin to categorize them as you move forward. And this is a great point. It's all about finding that balance of optimization and also what's realistic in your business. It's not realistic for you to go back to a board with thousands of pins and categorize them to sections with 20 to 100 pins. It just is not realistic. So start as you mean to go on. So begin to create sections. Limit it to 20 to 100 pins. Okay, so to summarize that boards are coming into view more, they are becoming more important than we used to see them as. Before, we saw them as a bucket, right, like a housing mechanism in order to categorize it for SEO. But now the user is going to be seeing it and engaging with it. So it's just really important that you don't tuck boards and sections away in the back of your mind, but you kind of bring them a little bit more. More into focus. Here was a great fact that came up in my research. Boards updated within the last three months have been shown to help drive higher pin engagement. So let me say that again. Boards updated within the last Three months have been shown to help drive higher pin engagement. This is really important for those of you who this applies to non seasonal boards. Right? I think I'm going to kind of categorize these between seasonal and non seasonal. Non seasonal boards can be something like home decor. If you haven't pinned to your home decor board in two years, it's probably not going to get a lot of engagement because it shows that you're not active. But if you have an active home decor board where you are pinning to the boards and to the sections, it's going to increase your engagement. So a lot of people will ask us, hey, I am pinning and I am not getting any engagement. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. This could be step number one. Investigate the boards that you are pinning to and not pinning to. If you are looking for engagement on something that you maybe haven't pinned to in six, seven, eight months, two years now, maybe you need to go into that board, you need to organize it again. Barring that you don't have thousands of pins, let's assume you have like 2 to 300. Organize it. Start to pin to the boards and then the sections and see if it increases getting engagement. Here's another question that I had. Do board sections help with SEO and searchability on Pinterest? Here's what I got in response. The short answer is yes. Take it a step further by organizing your pins into specific labeled sections within your boards. By doing this, you not only create more visually appearing, appealing and user friendly experience, you also provide richer context for your content. Board sections act as signals and can improve the searchability and relevance of your pins, helping the audience engage more deeply with your collections inside your boards. Okay, so my follow up question to that is, okay, where do I publish my pin first? Do I need to factor in sections to that? The same advice I've always shared applies. Start with the most relevant board that aligns best with your goals and what you want to draw your audience's attention to. Afterwards, you can re pin or save the pin to other relevant boards. This strategy can help enhance the visibility of a PIN for different audiences who might find it inspiring for various reasons. So always start with the most relevant board that aligns with the goals of the pin. So here is a walkthrough. If you are someone who has a skincare line and you have something, you have a board called Nighttime Skincare Routine for Women or it's just even Nighttime Skincare routine, then if you've just created a piece of content Then you want to pin it to that board, especially if it's around a nighttime skincare routine, so that it gets the most visibility off of that first pin. This is not new. This is something we've known for a while. It's just really important that we continue to do this type of habit. So, yes, sections can act as signals that can improve searchability and relevance of that pin. All right, some best practices. This is putting feet to what we know now and what we know. Let me kind of pause here, what we know now. Sections within boards are really important for businesses to be using in order to improve SEO and search visibility for the end user. That's what we figured out. Number two, we've also figured out the boards need to be limited in the number of pins on the board. 20 to 100 pins within the board, then within the section, because people only scroll three to four times before they move away. So we want to get the most bang for our buck by having those pins be the best pins, the most relevant so that people will engage with him. Okay, we're on the same page. All right, here's your best practices then. When should you create a section within a board? When you have more than 100 pins on a board. If you have 20 pins, 30 pins, 40 pins, and you are listening to this thinking, should I create a section? You don't have to. You can leave it exactly how it is going to be. But if you plan on making this board pretty robust and you want to begin to create sections, you can certainly do that. So how do you do that? You create a board, then you add a section to the board, and then you save pins directly to those sections. Now, some of you might be asking, I use a scheduling tool. Can I schedule to sections? No, you cannot. I don't even believe you can do that with the Pinterest scheduler. So this is going to have to be a little bit of a manual component if you have a lot of sections you're trying to pin to. So the strategy for publishing pins then becomes starting with the most relevant board that aligns with your goals, and then after that, you can save it to other boards. Okay, all right. How do you optimize the section? You can just create it within a rando board. But here's what you need to do. Picture yourself. You have a board, right? And you were looking at this board as a way to optimize and categorize your content. Number one, you have a great title. Number two, you have a great description. Number three, you have a great Name of a board section within that practical example would be home decor Description would be talking about what types of home decor ideas are going to be shared within that particular board. And then the section is about bathroom remodels. And then you can add the most relevant pins and they use this word, the most representative pins in the first two rows, five to ten pins or so. So that when somebody comes on the board, they see the board, they're like, oh, I'm interested in my bathroom refresh. And I see these great pins and I get to choose from them and then save them to my board. Okay. They gave this great tip to diversify formats. And I thought, what does that mean? Like, what do you mean by diversify formats? So you can use different types of content and pins. Here's an example. Save collages. Think mood boards, room staging, outfit, flat lays, trends and themes. Here's a new stat that I didn't know. Pinterest pinners on Pinterest, save collages at two times the rate of other pin types. And I will put a reference below in the description to that data and where it is pulled from. It's the Pinterest internal data from January of 2024. Again, we have the screeching car. What is happening? Collages. I have done a podcast here about collages, and some of you have tried to figure out how to use them, how to, you know, fuse them into your marketing. And now we have this where it says people are saving them more often. I have seen them pop up in my feed quite a bit. So it's really great for you. If you can do collections, let's say, if you're a clothing seller or you have a lot of great recipes around a particular fruit or vegetable or dinner or something like that, this is relatively new. So it's going to take some inspiration and some collective involvement for us to see some really great examples of collages that are getting great engagement. You can also share product pins on this particular board, image pins and video pins. So now we have this fully optimized board where we say, okay, a really great, I guess, gold standard board on Pinterest, again, has a great name, it has a great description. And now we have sections with multiple formats of pins within those boards. We have video, we have static images, we have collages, we have product pins if you are a product seller. So that if I was to go to this board, I would find a lot of great inspiration inside these boards. Okay. For content creators, here's some ideas for Recipe creators use colorful and bright pictures. Those in the beauty space include how to videos, step by step pictures and products with the links. Please always include links if you can. That is just an incredibly frustrating user experience when there are no links. As someone who has been searching on Pinterest for ideas for my backyard awning, I cannot tell you how many people do not have links. Please put them there. I will buy from you. Fashion Use a variety of colors, poses range of vendors and include some budget options. I see some great ideas in the fashion space around different pieces of clothing. I think there's just some brilliant ways you can use boards and sections. For those who are merchants and sellers, add product pins on a non blank background. Pinners want to see the product and how it will fit in their space. So putting your product in the backyard, in the living room, in the kitchen, they want to visualize what it's going to look like and this helps them use a mix of images and videos. Again, we get back to the variety. Include all product variations, multiple colors if you have them and mix up both product pins and inspirational pins. If you are a seller. One of the things I encourage you is to really create content. Create something around styling a piece of clothing you have or utilizing the skin care in whatever way that you can give more context than just simply an image. Show the life of your product. It will get more people to buy. Okay, that was a lot. And some of you who have been on Pinterest for a while might be thinking this is a big change. We always thought sections were really just important for the pinner on Pinterest. We didn't think it was important for the marketer. And what we are finding is that it is because it serves the end user on Pinterest, because it serves the pinner. And we want to put them front and center because we want them to become customers, we want them to become readers. We are going to put all of this information into a blog post so you can go read it on simplepinmedia.com 424 so that you can go through and you can reference some of the specifications that I talked about in this podcast. But I think if I was going to give you a takeaway, it would be this. Look at your Pinterest profile with fresh eyes. Look at it from the perspective of somebody who doesn't know you. Somebody who's going to begin to interact with you and interact with your pins. If you were coming onto your board, what sections would be most helpful to you? What types of pins within those sections would Be most helpful to you. How could you really capitalize in a way that helps the pinner get to what they're looking for, be inspired and become a future reader, a future listener, a future buyer, whatever it is your goal is. But I really want you to think about how you can make it a great pinner experience on the platform. I want to emphasize this too. You have to match both, moving forward with best practices, with the reality of what you can do. So if you're listening to this saying, I really can't do all of this, that is fine. I want you to start with one board. In fact, that's what I'm going to do as well. I'm going to start with one of my Pinterest boards and I'm going to begin to break it down into sections. Not all of them, because I have pins with that or boards with thousands of pins. But I want to start to create some order on my top board in particular and see if that increases engagement of my pins. I would love to hear your questions. What, what questions do you have? I take these questions directly to the Pinterest team. Some of them they can answer and some of they can, they cannot, which I'm sure you understand how that is. It's just how big companies run. But the Pinterest team has been more than helpful and I want to thank them for working on this with me. This has been a deep project. We've definitely taken a long time on this, but. But we wanted to get it right for you and we wanted to get the information to you as quickly as possible. And also for those who are new on Pinterest so you could start the right way so that you can create great, great boards. You can create great sections that serve the end user. Again, thank you for. Thank you to Pinterest for helping me create this in the partnership with them inside the Pinterest Educator program. If you have questions, if you're on YouTube, comment below on this video and I can help answer those. If you are listening on the podcast, you can go to the blog post Again, it's simplepinmedia.com424 and you can ask on that blog post. We do answer blog comments. And if you really need to write me a long email, which some people do, you can do that. Hello, simplepin media.com we do read them. So thank you so much for listening. Listening today to the Simple Pin podcast. I hope this inspires you and encourages you to create a way better Pinterest board that is going to engage great users and great pinners on the platform.