As Pinterest continues to evolve its search tools and boost its core functionality, it’s also working to provide more presentation options to make it easier for users to display their Pin content how they’d like.
Last November, Pinterest added new board ‘Sections’, which enables users to divide their boards into specific sub-groupings within the main topic. Now, Pinterest’s adding a range of new tools along similar lines, giving you more ways to customize your Pin set-up.
The first new option is the ability to archive your old Pinterest boards, which not only enables you to clean up your Pinterest profile presentation, but will also help in improving the relevance of your recommended Pins.
As you can see, the new ‘Archive’ option is available within your existing board settings. Once a board is archived, it’ll be listed in a new section at the bottom of your profile, so you can re-visit those Pins whenever you need.
While this not only enables further profile customization, as noted, it will also improve your future recommendations.
The use case Pinterest notes here is for something like a wedding board:
“…when you archive your wedding board after the big day, you’ll stop seeing recommendations for dresses, bouquets and other related ideas.”
Pinterest also notes that while only you can see your archived boards, you can still share them with family or friends using the 'Send' button.
The second new option is the ability to re-order your Sections to further enhance your Pin profile presentation.
This builds upon the aforementioned Sections option – now, you can not only create sections, but you can put them where you’d like, which may help bring focus to the sections you want at different times.
“For example, if you’re taking a trip, you can order sections according to your itinerary. If you’re meal planning, you can move this week’s recipes to the top of your board.”
The option will also have benefits for businesses, which will be able to arrange their content presentation by season or sales focus.
- On iOS or the web, open a board, long press on a section and drag to reorder it. Or select the Organize button to collapse all your sections and drag them to new positions.
- If you’re on Android, open a board, tap the Organize button then Reorder sections to drag them to new positions.
But maybe the biggest new addition is an option to re-arrange Pins within your boards.
Pinterest says this has been one of its most requested features. As you can see from the above example, you can now drag your Pins to place them wherever you’d like, further enabling you to put more focus onto specific content.
- On iOS and the web, long press on a Pin to drag and drop it to a new spot. Or from any platform, tap Organize from a board or section to drag Pins to new positions.
- As always, you can copy or move multiple Pins to different boards or sections using the Organize button.
And the last new addition is a new set of options for sorting Pinterest boards on the web, making it easier to find the content you’re after.
Now you can click the ‘Sort Boards’ button to arrange your boards by:
- Alphabetical order
- Most recently saved to
- Board creation date (newest or oldest)
- Custom order (drag and drop to arrange them)
All of these new options will enable better Pin customization and presentation, while also providing additional functionality for users looking for specific ideas.
As we’ve noted previously, Pinterest may not get the coverage that the other major platforms get, but at 200 million users and counting - and given the way it’s used to help inform purchase decisions by active Pinners – it should be a key consideration for most retail businesses in social.
There’s a range of ways in which the platform can be used to showcase your products and services, and with more social media managers looking for alternatives as Facebook squeezes organic reach, Pinterest may become a much bigger consideration in 2018.
