If you’ve been on Pinterest recently, you might have noticed something a little different about your account:
You’re getting a lot more messages. This is due to a change in how Pinterest alerts users to new Pins on their group boards.
'What's Up With Pinterest's New Group Board Messages?'
What’s Happening?
With this change, your fellow collaborators are sent a message when someone saves a Pin to the group board. This is done when you Pin organically, use a third party scheduling app (like Tailwind), or when you drag a Pin to the chat bubble on a group board:
The Pins will show up both on the collaborative board and in your group message. This change only effects group boards with fewer than 20 collaborators.
Why The Change?
Pinterest activated this new feature to help facilitate conversations around Pins on group boards. For example, if you’re Pinning about an upcoming vacation with friends, you can all automatically discuss the options for activities, hotels, and restaurants right on Pinterest.
By having the Pin show up as a message, you can bypass creating a separate thread to have a discussion around the topic.
What If I Don’t Want to See Group Board Messages?
Right now, there’s not a way to specifically opt-out of this feature. You can leave the group board, block certain collaborators, or add people until your board has more than 20 collaborators. While there is not a way to leave group chats yet, Pinterest is looking for feedback on the feature here.
What do you think about group chats on Pinterest? Let us know in the comments!
33 Comments
Melissa, Thank you for sharing this information. When I got the first message from group boards I had no idea what it was and it was unsettling.
IMHO, the idea is great, but the execution is poor. Imagine people who have many group boards with less than 20 people. How many messages will they get? It screams SPAM; nobody likes it.
Fortunately, I don’t have many group boards but it makes sense to add a feature where people would be able to opt-out and only activate it when they will be using it to collaborate and share ideas like it’s meant to.
What do you think about this update? I’d love to know 🙂
Thanks again for the information.
Cheers,
Jonathan Nuñez
Founder, John’s IMSecrets
Hi Jonathan! I’m glad you enjoyed the post 🙂
I’m with you on this. I appreciate the ease of communication with fellow Pinners, but it’s not necessary for every group board. Hopefully they’ll introduce an opt-out option before too long!
However, I would be curious to know if it increases click-throughs or Repins since it’s a much more obvious addition to the board. If Pins are being sent directly to you, are you more likely to check them out?
I agree with you, it will be interesting to see if sending a pin increases engagement. But, I believe it’s not the best approach.
If you ask me to check a pin out and help you share it, I would be willing to help. But doing things like this feels pushy and I believe people will start to resent it.
Think about it, we love freedom and get pissed when there are barriers to obtaining what we want. Let me ask you something: When was the last time you saw the full video ad on a YouTube video?
If you are anything like me, you most likely do the following. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Skip. We hate interruptions. Having said that, when I see the sponsored part of a video, it feels organic and I actually watch it.
To me, pushing pins feel like an interruption and I immediately deleted them.
I know I could be wrong. This is a new feature and could get more attention to pins but I’m not sure about the results being positive.
What do you think about it, Melissa?
Cheers,
Jonathan Nuñez
It makes me feel spammed and want to leave a group.I’m already sharing with small groups without this feature.
Hi Melissa.
First, thank you for writing this. These things have been driving me crazy since last week and I didn’t understand what was going on with them. Also didn’t understand why only some of my group boards were showing me messages.
Good to know it’s limited to group boards with less than 20 collaborators.
The idea holds value, but the UI execution is completely wrong. I share a group board between two of my accounts and when I visit that board the whole left side of my screen is filled up with message bubbles.
It also didn’t help that there was no communication about this. A couple group board owners messaged me thinking I was spamming the group when I hadn’t changed a single thing.
The thought behind it is decent, but unfortunately they completely bombed on both the communication of what this feature does and the execution of it.
Glad to see what is going on. I do have to say however in all openness this is not a welcome feature. I am getting too many messages from people i do not interact with nor intend to interact with on any frequent basis.This should not be channeled through received messages but perhaps as “News”. On another note I am glad to see the implementation of the feed options. It’s brought me back to Pinterest once more as I never liked the suggestions as I am a micro-manager type who loves following the people I opt to follow. The new messaging from group boards actually makes me want to abandon all my group boards which I’m sure is not the intent of this new feature. So from me a thumbs down to it. Sorry 🙁
The biggest problem I find is that I can’t see ACTUAL messages amid all the fake ones. I want to join more group boards, but it’s not likely owners will see my message, and I’ll probably miss theirs! They really need to distinguish between *messages* and *pins*!
It’s driving me crazy — every time I log into Pinterest, the first three words that come to mind are ‘make it stop.’ Is it a great idea? Sure. However, we should be able to turn it off. It’s incredibly overwhelming.
I can see the value in this for people who aren’t bloggers and may be collaborating with each other on recipes, design ideas, etc. But for us bloggers who are members of many, many group boards, it is a bit annoying to have the home screen with all the bubbles on the side. I look forward to Pinterest giving us an on/off switch for this feature.
I HATE THIS NEW FEATURE. It’s causing a huge problem for many of the group boards I have going with other low carb bloggers. I could just add more collaborators but then the quality of the content is harder to control. I schedule hundreds of pins a week so this is an issue. If only Pinterest at least made it a feature of personal and NOT business accounts that would go a long way to solving the problem for bloggers and businesses who pin to many groups! Hopefully Pinterest is paying attention to all the negative feedback on this issue and will address it quickly!
I send feedback every single day regarding this new feature. Pinterest has made many idiotic moves, but this is the worst.
Oh my goodness. You just made me LOL, Jessica. I have to agree though, this is terrible! Way to make sure we miss any messages we might actually want to see! Feels so spammy.
So true, right? It’s complete spam, and doing the opposite of what they hoped to achieve. sigh…
well said 🙂 a terrible move!
Great update, thanks, I was wondering about this. I *wish* Pinterest would spend their time improving existing functionality that’s buggy instead of inventing new crap I don’t want LOL.
Thanks so much for writing this! I’ve been wondering what is going on everytime I login I have like 50 Messages ?
How hard would it have been for them to make it an “opt in” feature, rather than forcing every user to see those annoying messages and buttons that won’t go away. With no way to turn it off, no less!
It is SO obnoxious. I can’t stand it.
I’m sure this new feature will be nice for some but (I’m with Shelley) I wish Pinterest had put their time and energy into making it easier to request to be added and to add people to a group board, rather than creating this messaging feature. Right now the one at a time add and guessing game for who you have vs. haven’t invited yet is super frustrating. Besides, with this new feature I seem to have lost the ability to heart a pin that was placed on my group boards. 🙁
I HATE this feature. I make it a point to always respond to messages – it’s a great way to interact with my target audience – but this new group board nonsense makes it way too easy to miss a message I should be responding to in all the clutter. I’ve received 42 new “messages” in the last hour. Who has time to filter through all that??
According to Mike Allton from the Social Media Hat, you CAN turn these off! Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working for everyone – myself included. But it’s worth a try 🙂
Head to your settings, scroll to “notifications”, and click on “Pick which group boards you hear about”. From there you can turn on and off notifications.
Check out Mike’s post here: https://www.thesocialmediahat.com/article/how-disable-pinterest-board-notifications
Melissa, Mike’s solution is for email notifications (see the last picture from his post), not for the other notifications (from the Messages tab). That’s why it didn’t work for you 🙂 He refers wrongly to notifications, instead of referring to email notifications.
Thanks Melissa! I like the idea of the feature, now that it’s becoming manageable. There are instances of group boards where I could see notifications making sense – but not ALL.
Thank you so much Melissa! I was able to turn mine off. I’m really not a fan of this new feature either.
Was wondering what’s with the stream of notifications on the left – hardly helps, don’t like this new update one bit 🙁 Thanks for the clarification in this post!
I don’t like it because I prefer that my followers write their comments on my blog or in our FB groups. Spreads the communication too much and takes more time. Not a beneficial feature to my blog. Or if they are looking for something appropriate for Pinterest, have the comment go on the pin, not to me. I am happy to write back there! The Accidental Artist on Pinterest
Pinterest needs to STOP making changes. If its not broke dont fix it. I have not liked any of their new changes. They need to leave it all alone!
I so very much appreciate you covering this. Count me in on the HATE it! side. When those annoying bubbles starting popping up over the top of my screen, I wasted a lot of time trying to search to figure out what it was, and how to turn it off! No luck until you came through with this explanation. Thank you! I feel it is spammy and and can’t wait until they give me the opportunity to opt out. Another unwelcome change was the new view… it made my board covers cut in half on my laptop. What’s the best way to deal with that?
Unfortunately the ability to turn off notifications only affects email. You can’t turn off in-app notifications. If you have email notifications turned off already, you won’t see the option Mike mentioned.
Please, please, PLEASE discontinue this feature – this is a group plea!!!
Hello guys! Is there any community to discuss latest Pinterest Updates? If no, I think it’s a good idea to start one, how do you think?
Change this. I’m already pinning a pin on the board – there’s no need to then send it in a chat when the whole point is to check the board! If I want to send a message through the messenger to the group – I will do that – but to auto send the new pin in a message group (specially tons of pins) it’s obnoxious. Not only that, but it doesn’t even show my commentary – it uses the original! So there is literally NO point!
Hate this new feature! Annoying & blocks part of the screen. Should be able to OPT OUT of it! Better yet, don’t roll out features like this without providing a way to opt out!