If you have a passion for organizing, filing, and generally creating order out of chaos, you’re going to love Pinterest Board sections. What better way to find exactly what you want, WHEN you want it than by dividing up a personal or Group Board with hundreds of Pins into logical sections?
It’s important to note that Pinterest Board sections aren’t as impactful for Pinterest marketing as niche Pinterest Boards, but they still have a ton of value for personal use and organization!
Not only do they help you keep your content organized, but they also make Pins easier to find for your Pinterest followers when navigating your Boards.
And, Pinterest sections are easy to use! So, let’s get into the details and start organizing!
I said before that adding sections to your Pinterest Board is simple. It’s also easy to move tons of Pins into your new sections, and even turn sections into their own Boards! I’m covering all the how-tos you need to know below.
You can also create Pinterest Board sections on desktop, then add Pins using No Pressure Life blogger Laura’s steps for organizing your Board!
“Go to the Board you want to create a section for. Click “+Section” and name your section. Then within the larger Board, click the “Organize” button. Click on all the Pins you want to move to that new section, then select “Move” and choose the section from the drop-down menu that appears.”
You’ll notice that when you find a new Pin to save, Pinterest Boards with sections will have an arrow next to them in your Boards List. If you tap this Board, you’ll be able to choose the section you’d like to add it to.
On this screen, you can also add a new section to the Board!
This option isn’t available for Boards you haven’t set up sections on yet. Don’t worry, you can always go in and add them later.
To delete a Pinterest Board section in the Pinterest mobile app, here’s what to do:
Keep in mind, this will remove all your Pins in the section permanently. Move them all out first if you want to keep those Pins, or merge the board with another section.
You can do this by selecting the Pins you want to keep, tapping edit, and moving them to another section or Board for safe-keeping.
Feeling like your section might be better off as a new, separate Board? It’s simple to do! While you can’t exactly flip a switch to turn a section into a new Board yet, there’s a simple workaround – creating a new Pinterest Board, and moving all the Pins in your Board section to it! Here’s how:
Once your Pins are saved to the new Board, you can delete the section.
Likely every Pinterest marketer in the universe I’ve wondered, “How can I use Board sections to increase my exposure in search on Pinterest?”
While using sections will help your Pinned content appear in search, it’s less effective than creating Pinterest Boards with niche titles. After all, that wasn’t the intended purpose of the feature!
“It’s really a Pinner feature that we mainly did to help you guys organize your Pins. So this was us really wanting to put our Pinners first here, making it easier for you to use Pinterest and have a really great experience.” Presenter, Pinterest Insiders webinar
Right now, you’re much better off using niche Boards titles to improve your Pinterest marketing. Rather than “Home Remodeling,” create Boards for “Bathroom Remodeling,” “Kitchen Remodeling Ideas,” etc.
While Pinterest Board sections aren’t the most impactful way for getting more visibility for your Pins, they’re still a handy way to keep your Boards organized, specific and user-friendly.
After all, innovative user features like sections are good for everyone.
This may cause people to take action on Pins they’ve saved even more frequently and it may even encourage people to stay on the platform longer!
However, if you’re thinking of using Pinterest Board sections in your marketing versus personal use, ask yourself if you could more effectively reach your audience by creating a Board with a niche title.
Remember that Google Search indexes Board titles but not Board sections – so you’re going to get more exposure from a whole Board than a small section.
Alisa Meredith is Pinterest Product Specialist at Tailwind — a Pinterest marketing tool, scheduling tool, planning tool and analytics platform. She is a sought-after speaker and teacher on Pinterest and Promoted Pins in particular, having spoken at Social Media Marketing World, Agents of Change and appearing on The Art of Paid Traffic and Social Pros podcasts. Alisa has invested heavily in becoming an expert in her craft – realizing (and loving) the fact that the learning never ends! She lives in coastal North Carolina with her pampered pets Pepe the couch potato Cavapoo, and more cats than she’d like to admit to.
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I just created a board section in Pinterest desktop. To do it, go to the board you want to create a section for. Click "+Section" and name your section. Then within the larger board, click "Organize". Click on all the pins you want to move to that new section, then select "Move" and choose the section from the drop-down menu that appears. Hope this helps!
Perfect! Thanks, Laura, I didn't think of using the "Organize" button (SMH!). I'm going to add that in. ~ Alisa
Saw this last week and started making sections for some of my boards. As a fine artist, I like the idea for easy organization, because I can have all my series under one board instead of 100s of boards for all my different series. Now they are there under "My Paintings"
Love to hear how people are using great new Pinterest features - thanks, Will!
I'm using sections for my boards with over 1000 pins. For marketing it's not ideal but, my followers might like the ease of going to one section to find what she's looking for instead of scrolling through the whole board.
Interestingly, the way people use Pinterest now, most action takes place via search rather than looking through profiles or boards for the reasons you stated - 1,000 Pins is a lot to look through! Thanks for your comment, Marcia! ~ Alisa
When saving new pins I send them to my secret board for editing and SEO tweaking. Now my secret board has a section for each of my most active boards. This way I can make further edits and schedule the pins for each public board. It's a neat organizing tool.
That's a very clever use of board sections, Duane! ~ Alisa
Hi. Thanks so much for this article and for clarifying a few queries I had. I have only used the Board Section on my website board at this stage as I have noticed that as soon as you move a pin from the main board into a section it no longer shows you how many repins you have and the only way to find out is to click on the pin and select the graph option at the top to see. I find this quite frustrating and time consuming so have rather opted to increase the number of board that I have. Thanks again. Michelle
Hi Michelle. That's interesting - I hadn't noticed that change. Thanks for sharing! ~ Alisa
What about creating sections with keyword rich titles? And do you think that Pinterest is going the Facebook route of rewarding people who use their new features? I’ve heen using them because I am anticipating them being of use in the future but would love to hear your thoughts!
Hi, Lyndsey! Nope, keyword-rich titles won't matter here. At least for now. I do think Pinterest likes us to use the platform natively, but they called this feature out as expressly for user convenience, so I would say no. If they're helpful to you (as they are to me on my private boards), keep at it - but not for marketing purposes. Thanks for stopping by! ~ Alisa
i've just started using sections, it's a feature i've wanted forever! when i'm pinning, it is hard to scroll through so many pins (like mentioned above!) but i feel if other pinners use sections i can go through each section that i'm interested in, rather than scrolling for miles for something I might like (i enjoy getting lost on pin adventures, regularly)
Pin adventures are the best :).
I would like to know how to delete a section? I have already moved all pins out of the sections I wish to delete. But there is not an option to delete the section under edit. Has anyone successfully deleted a section?! Thanks for any help!!
Hmmm, when I go to edit a section, I do get a delete option. I click on the pencil and an edit section box pops up with a button in the bottom left to delete the section. You don't get that?
Can you delete sections after you created them?
You can! When you are in the section, click on the pencil and an edit section box pops up with a button in the bottom left to delete the section.
I haven’t figured out how to DELETE a section. And in trying to empty a section, hoping it might autodelete, I lost all the pins :(Can anyone tell the noob how to delete a section pretty-please.
Hey Shawn, you can edit the section and delete it, but that will delete all the Pins in section as well. Sounds like not everyone was seeing that option to delete, though!
Thanks for this post, I've been interested to see what the consensus is about using the new sections.
I'm using sections on my "podcast" board. Since the topics of the episodes vary, I think this will make it easier for someone who comes across the board to zero in on their interest. (Section examples: "Universal Orlando", "Disney World", etc.) I'm also pinning everything to the general section of the board for anyone who just wants to see all my episode images.
Even though Pinterest says it doesn't affect search, I have to think it'll have an impact. An image that's pinned to a board called "Go Informed Podcast" AND in the sub-category "Universal Orlando" seems like it would be more likely to come up in a search for Universal Orlando than one that's just pinned under "Go Informed Podcast". That said, I'm not going back through all my boards and doing this. I already get pretty granular with many of my board topics so I don't think it's necessary to break everything up into small categories.
That's a great use for the sections!
Well, that's why I asked, because it seemed like board section titles could be a logical SEO signal if they wanted to use it for that - but they have chosen not to. It's just for users to make things easier to find on their own accounts, which is a cool feature!