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This is the one foundational thing that makes Pinterest different than all the other social media platforms or marketing platforms that you get to choose from. I'm going to dive deep into it today. In a recent conversation with one of my Pinterest educator friends, we discussed some hurdles that marketers might have regarding using Pinterest, namely, how boards work. For me, this was such a light bulb moment. I hadn't really thought about how boards work because I've just been on Pinterest forever. But for the first time I empathized with the concept, being one that might cause marketers some frustration or confusion and even cause them to give up on marketing a little too soon. In order to help overcome any misunderstandings people might have about boards, I wanted to teach more about the history, the concept, and how this can help marketers reach more people on Pinterest. So I thought it would be best to partner with the source itself. Yes, Pinterest, to pull together definitions, resources and workflows for how to better utilize boards for marketing. This podcast is being created in partnership with Pinterest. I am a participant in the Educator program and the team there has helped me pull together these resources and data to bring you this podcast in video. What I want to show you today is how boards are collections. They're a way people save and organize ideas, and they're really what sets Pinterest apart from every single other platform. I believe once you understand how pinners use boards, you will know exactly how to tailor your content or your products and your strategy to meet them where they are at. So let's go to some history. In order to understand how we even got boards on Pinterest, I needed to go back and visit an old video that one of the co founders of Pinterest, Ben Silberman, had done. Here's how he broke down the original idea behind boards. I'm also going to reference this video in the show notes so you can go watch the whole thing for yourself. Pinterest founders saw a gap. People always have collected things, think stamps or recipes, anything that would inspire them. But there was no good way to organize collections online, so they built boards to solve that problem. The original idea was simple. Let people pin an object, add it to a collection, AKA a board, and share it with their friends. But once those collections went online, something bigger happened. Each item linked to related things, which led to more discovery. You could see what else belonged on your board that you hadn't thought of yet. What made Pinterest special wasn't just organizing your own stuff. It was seeing other people's collections and getting inspired by how they organized the same ideas, but maybe differently. Ben Silverman put it this way. Pinterest is the first tool that lets anyone with a phone organize the world's objects in a way that makes sense to them by project passion or product. And that organization makes discovery easy for everybody else. People are organizing the web's content at a massive scale, making ideas more human. Think of it like this. Google organizes things by a text query. And maybe even now we see more of a long word query as we get into the new AI models. Pinterest organized things by interest, which is also leveraging AI too. But this is the fundamental difference there is. You go to Google, you put in some information in order to get an answer quickly. But Pinterest, you go there and you get results based on what you're interested in. Okay, now let's move to how the Pinner views those boards so we know why Pinterest has created it. Now let's see how the Pinners engage with them. Let's talk about curation mindset. Pinterest users aren't passively scrolling like they do on other platforms. They're actively collecting and organizing. That intent completely changes how they interact with the content. They aren't just consuming, they're building something. Which frankly, when I use Pinterest versus other platforms, makes me feel a little bit better when I'm actually building something instead of just consuming things for hours on end. So here's what makes boards really different. They're aspirational spaces. People create boards for their future selves. The dream wedding they're planning, the home renovation they're saving for the trip they want to take someday. That forward looking behavior is pretty unique compared to Instagram or TikTok or any other social platform where everything can feel in the moment. For the Pinner, a board is a way to visualize their dream, help them with decision making. When your pin is on that board, this is what leads to a purchase or an action. There's also an emotional relationship that people have with their boards. I was talking to my Gen Z daughter the other day and it's her world that she's curated. It's not just hitting this generic save button. When you name a board, you watch it grow over time and you curate what goes in it. You go back to revisit it, which leaves you feeling like you have ownership over it. You're invested and that's why people come back to their boards over and over again. So let's make the leap to business and how you can make those boards work for your business. I also understand that this is where we have a little bit of the gap and where some marketers can get confused. If you're coming from social media, you're pretty used to the straightforward model. You post something, it shows up in your feed. People see it, they engage. Or maybe they don't. It's immediate and it's kind of linear, right? But Pinterest works differently because they're a visual search engine first, not social media. When someone finds your content, they're not just liking it or scrolling past it, they might actually be searching for it and then they're saving it to a board. That board has a specific purpose, especially to them, and a specific theme and maybe even a specific project attached to it. Your pin now becomes part of their collection, sitting there alongside other ideas they're gathering later. If Pinterest sees that people are continuing to engage with similar content, it might surface more of your content in their feed and search results so that they can find it. So the marketer hurdle for you is that you're not just fighting for attention in a feed, which we are commonly used to when we think of social media. You need to create content that is worth saving, worth organizing into a collection, worth coming back to later. It's a completely different behavior you're designed for, right? And if you don't understand how boards work, you're just going to keep wondering why your Pinterest strategy isn't working. So let's go down to some basics. How do you even create a board? I want you to think about creating boards with your audience in mind. What do they want to see that will help them decide if they want to take action or to learn more about who you are and what you do and what you sell? Number one is a board name. Do not make this cutesy. Do not make this something that maybe only you internally know about. Make it a clear title that tells people exactly what they will find. You can stack this using relevant trending search terms or keywords that you know people use. Being very specific will win here. Then you want to add a description. This is where you add context and where you kind of pack in strategic keywords, maybe in two to three natural sounding sounds, sentences. Think about the actual phrases people would type into the search bar when they're looking for this particular topic. That's what you should put into the description. Then we have sections. I have done a whole podcast with Pinterest on sections. I will Link that down below in the show notes. But we think of a board as collections and then we take and we break that board into sections. Now we're covering multiple like sections, sub themes. So if your board grows bigger than a hundred pins that you have pinned to it, it makes more sense for you to put on there a section so that people can find exactly what they're looking for. Because they are not going to scroll 3, 4, 5. Well, they'll scroll 3 to 4, that's the typical user behavior. But they're not going to go five, six, seven, a thousand pins later to find what they're looking for. So sections are really a way to support them in the functionality. Then organize them. Don't just let pins pile up randomly. Move them, reorder them. So the best and most relevant content is at the top. Put pins in the sections in the boards where they actually belong. Here's a great tip. The first three pins are the pins that will show up on the board's thumbnail. So make sure you choose wisely because when people come to your Pinterest profile, what do they see? They see your boards and the boards have these thumbnails. So whatever first three pins you choose will show up on those thumbnails. Okay, now let's get to the how to how to use boards for your Pinterest marketing strategy. This will work both for content creators and merchants. Number one, start by understanding what people are actually searching for. There are three main types of content that you need to think about. One is seasonal. Pinterest is so seasonal people tend to go to the platform and search for something at least 45 days in advance. Think holidays, back to school, wedding season, summer travel. You can create boards that are ideas naturally tethered to these seasonal pieces. Number two is evergreen. These are the things that people search for year round, no matter what the season. Meal prep, productivity tips, home organization. And then third is kind of your trendy boards. Pinterest predicts comes out every single year talking about what will be trending on the platform. They give us great trends and keywords ID keyword ideas. We need to be using those to create a few boards that are tied into what's happening with pop culture right now. Think of viral aesthetics, celebrity driven trends, current events. Knowing which bucket your content falls into helps you decide when to create a new board versus updating an existing one. So put a pin in that thought right there that I just said. I'll revisit that in just a minute, but I want to go over these three boards Just one more time. Seasonal, evergreen and trending. I also want to make a quick distinguisher too. There are people who are targeting other business users like me and there's people targeting consumers on Pinterest. Sometimes the trendy doesn't work with those who are business to business users like me. Maybe they work better for business to consumer. So just because I've listed these three doesn't mean you always have to have them all. But I want you to be thinking in the realm of content or how your products fit in. Number two is use Pinterest tools to customize your board strategy. Pinterest gives us several ways to understand what your audience cares about and what's trending. Here's what they are and how to use them. 1. We have audience insights. Dig into who's engaging with your content. What are their categories and interest? What is their age? That leads you to their generational demographic? What is their gender? What is their location? Breakdown? What devices are they using? Again, a little bit back to that business to business and business to consumer. I have a lot of desktop users which is not the norm because most people use Pinterest on their phone. So it's always good to pay attention that if you're in a different user base, that's not not typical. Go check that out. It's really important. Number two is analytics. This is where you can see what's actually performing. I like to tell people analytics are a way to get away from what you think is happening to really what you know is happening. You could check your top boards in your analytics overview to see what's resonating with people, what board is getting the most engagement. You can look at individual pin stats to see which boards people are saving your content to click on any pin you created and scroll to the stats below. Next is the Trends tool. I love this and it's getting an overhaul which is so great. There's just so many cool things that are happening on it. And this is where you can find inspiration for new boards and content to add. So use it alongside your audience insights and your Pinterest analytics to spot seasonal peaks or trends and to see what's currently really trending well with your audience. Together, all three of these tools show you not just what your audience likes, but what they're actively searching for so you can build boards that actually meet them where they're at. Number three in your strategy is to update existing boards. Let's assume for a moment you've created a lot of your boards. You're looking at data and then you see that you might need to change some names of your boards. You've looked at growing trends and the Save to these boards data help you figure out how to level up. Maybe you need to rewrite your board description with better keywords, break the board into sections for easier browsing, or make the title more specific to your niche. Next is create new boards. I love to do this a lot because I think it's a way for me to get in front of a new audience that might be searching for something different. So when you spot a new trend taking off or a seasonal moment coming up, don't just squeeze it into an existing board or think, well I have this old one, maybe I'll just reuse it, give it its own space. Use those trend insights to create a focused new board. Then create your existing pins and the new ones that fit into the theme. If you are a merchant selling products do not make your boards feel like a product catalog. Mix lifestyle imagery, aspirational imagery and video pins with all of your product pins so that board kind of tells a story, not just a list of things to buy. I have full tutorial as well on product taking a link that below in the description. The key is to stay flexible. Sometimes you you refresh what's working and sometimes you build something new from scratch. All right, so then how do we optimize a board for search? You want to curate strategically, not just for keywords. What do I mean by this? Don't just keyword. Stuff a bunch of words into board titles and board description and call it a day. Map your boards to your actual content pillars and to what's trending. Then do a quarterly check in an audit to see if your audience's interests have shifted or if they are in alignment. Use Pinterest search insights and your analytics to figure out what topics you're missing. Then create new boards and combine existing ones to fill in those gaps. The next tip is to make your titles and your descriptions work for you. Do your keyword research first, then revisit your board titles and descriptions like I said, every quarter or every even three to six months. Don't limit yourself on single topic boards. Think bigger and more specific. Try some A B testing too. Maybe somebody's putting in the search term vegan, but maybe it's time to switch to plant based. I was talking to a client the other day who has used clean eating for a long time, but high protein is definitely something that's trending. Maybe it's worth switching from using clean eating over over into high protein because that is what the audience is looking for. I love regular check ins and I've mentioned them twice already, but I think boards perform better when they are fresher. They are pinned to consistently with all of your great pins, your evergreen ideas and your new trending stuff. Boards that have been updated within the last three months have shown to help drive higher pin engagement, so keep those boards fresh. Okay, next step, let the data tell you what needs fixing. Dive into Pinterest analytics like we just talked about. Spot which boards are losing steam or maybe not getting engagement. Then kind of give them that refresh fresh visuals. Go back to that thumbnail idea. Reorder your pins so those top three will show off a great thumbnail. Rewrite your descriptions Ad trending content if you are an established marketer on Pinterest and you've used it for a long time, I would imagine there's a lot of boards that you have that really haven't been touched in a while. A quick win for you is to refresh them now. If you're new to Pinterest and you are wrapping your brain around this whole board thing, then you might not be in this place where the data is going to tell you what to fix yet. That's okay, just keep creating, Just keep moving forward and wait till you get to that 6912 month mark to make sure you do a little bit of auditing. You last want to use the trends to guide what boards you create. So let's say you feel fresh out of ideas. You do not even know where to start. Get ahead of seasonal moments. Think about what your audience is going to be searching for in the next couple of months. If you already know your audience pretty well, especially if you've been using marketing on other platforms, then you know some of the seasonal trends or maybe you know some of the cultural trends. Aim to launch boards with enough lead time, I like to say 45 days in advance and then sync some of your board updates if you're established with some new board launches so that you can kind of fuse your calendar together so that everything just works. But again, if you're new to it, you just want to start creating and use the Pinterest predicts to really guide where you're going, I'll link that too in the show notes. The last tip that I have for you with boards that I think even established marketers don't think about very often is you can share your boards with your audience. I've heard some really creative use cases over the years, especially for product sellers that they have built their board as a collection with both aspirational lifestyle and product pins and it's an easy way to showcase everything that maybe your website doesn't have the capability to do. Or you're a content creator that's compiled a certain new amount of recipes for their audience and you want to share it. This is how you do it. Open the board you want to share and tap on the share icon. You'll see a preview of your board as a video. If you want to customize which pins show or change the template, just tap to edit the pencil icon and you can feature up to 14 pins. From there you can either add to a story to share it directly to Pinterest. Create or download the video. If you want to post it somewhere else, you can also do this by grabbing the link and including it in your email list or sharing it somewhere else. Then you can share with your audience. Sharing your boards with your audience is a quick way to get your boards in front of more people and drive traffic back to your collections. Let's dive into some common questions that people have about boards. How many boards should I have? You want enough boards to cover your main content themes and tap into what's trending right now. If you're just getting started, aim for four boards as a baseline and make sure each one has at least 15 pins so it doesn't look empty or half baked. Should I save other people's pins to my boards? This is a very common question. People also want to know what does that do to my analytics? Yes, you are more than welcome to share other people's pins to your boards. Mixing your own pins with other relevant, high quality content from other creators can actually strengthen your boards and help your reach. When you create thoughtfully, you're building context around your topic, which signals to the Pinterest algorithm and to real people browsing that your board is legitimate, comprehensive and it is a resource for whatever it is that you're talking about. It's not just a promotional dump of your own stuff. Now I will say this. If you want to pin your own stuff for a while because you want to get into the groove of pinning, that is more than okay. The next question is how should merchants and publishers approach board optimization? Think of your boards as curated collections, right back to what we talked about in the beginning in their original design. This is not just a place for you to dump a bunch of stuff. Organize them thematically and keep them updated with fresh content from across your catalog so that each board feels valuable and worth following. And when I say catalog, I'm not just talking about product sellers, but I'm also talking about content creators. So make sure you pull in all things that feel curated for that collection. How specific should my board titles be? I want you to skip the one word titles. They are too vague to rank well and attract the right audience. Instead, stack two to three specific keywords together to create a rich descriptive title that tells people and Pinterest algorithm exactly what they'll find. Think about layering details like season plus trend plus specifics. Maybe something like summer butter yellow dresses or time plus topic plus duration 15 minute morning ab workouts. The more specific you get, the better you'll match what people are actually searching for and the clearer your board's purpose becomes. Last the this is a question that a lot of people have Should I delete boards or pins? Hold off on deleting Unless it is something that is off brand or spammy, deleting erases all the engagement in the search history that those pins have built up. Instead, maybe you can merge underperforming boards into stronger ones to preserve all of that. Always check analytics before you make any big moves. You might be surprised at what's actually driving traffic. So that's it. How did I do? Do you now understand how boards work on Pinterest and how it is so foundational to how everything works? I hope for those of you who are new to Pinterest or you're trying to figure out if it's going to work for your business, this gave you some insight to frame up how boards can really help support both your content or your products. For those of you that are established and you've been using Pinterest for a long time, I hope this was a refresh for you. I hope it gives you some new ideas, ways you can change up your board titles or even change up the content that's in your boards. As always, thank you so much for listening. I'd love it if you would like and subscribe on YouTube. Those of you who are watching on the video and those of you who are in your podcast app, make sure you follow or subscribe for all of the simple pin podcasts. This is number 449 which means the next step is 450450 episodes about Pinterest. Thank you so much for listening and watching.