What Are Pinterest Sections And How Do You Add Them to Your Boards?

Elna November 9, 2020 31 Comments

Hey mamas!

It’s that time of the year again! I’m doing my 12 Days series again this year. Last year, I posted for 12 days straight of free resources like Tailwind Tribes, planners and more.

This year I want to do something a little bit different. I want to share some pin-tastic Pinterest tips! Pinterest is my BFF and I realize I don’t talk about “her” much on Twins Mommy.

So, for the next 12 days, I’m going to be sharing some Pinterest tips to help you grow your blog traffic, list, and income. If you’re new to blogging and want to promote your blog, then Pinterest is your best free way to grow your blog traffic.

Day 1: An Easy Way to Find Keywords for Pinterest Descriptions

Day 2: What You Need to Know About Pinterest Hashtags

Day 3: What Are Pinterest Sections And How Do You Add Them to Your Boards?

Day 4: 4 Ways to Get More Saves on Your Pins

Day 5: 5 Big Pinterest Mistakes Bloggers Might Be Doing

Day 6: 5 Ways Any Blogger Can Make Money on Pinterest Today

Day 7: 5 Poppin’ Pinterest Podcasts for Bloggers

Day 8: 4 Pinterest Tools to Help You Grow Your Blog Traffic

Day 9: 3 Easy Ways to Grow Your Email List Using Pinterest

Day 10: How to Find the Best Times to Pin for Massive Blog Traffic

Day 11: 5 Top Pinterest Myths That Everyone Believes

Day 12: 5 Ways to Get Your Pinterest Profile Ready for 2019

For today I want to talk about Pinterest Sections.

This is a brand new feature from Pinterest and it can help you clean up your boards and can help your audience find the exact pin from you.

I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of personal boards. My most recent creation was Mom Fashion!

You soon learn that when you have a Pinterest profile you can go crazy creating niche types of boards – 20, 50, 100 boards! Yikes.

Pinterest Sections allow you to streamline your board’s pins making it easier for pinners to find your stuff. Win-win!

Okay, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, read on!

What are Pinterest Sections?

A section is like a subset of your board. Think of it as a mini-board inside your main board. You can section your boards and create sub-niche topics or you can look at your blog niche and see what main topics you have on your blog.

For example, let’s say you have a newborn board. You can add these sections:

breastfeeding
newborn sleeping
newborn musthaves
newborn schedule

For example, Twins Mommy’s topics include: making money blogging, starting a blog, starting an email list etc. For now, this is what my sections look like on my Twins Mommy board:

Everything is organized by topics making it so much easier to find your pins and for pinners to find your content 🙂

How Do You Use the New Sections Feature on Pinterest?

Sections are only for boards. Sections can be on your boards, your group board (that you created) AND even other group boards you belong to. Yes, you can create a section in someone else’s group board. For now, I would stick to using Sections only for your boards.

How can you use Sections to help you get more organized?

Clean up your boards. If you have similar board topics you can move all your Pins from similar boards into one board with sections.
Use it to plan your holidays. A great way to use sections is to create a secret gift board and section it with the people you want to give gifts to!
Niche down your board. You can pick one board and create sub-categories for that board and choose the pins from that board you want to add to your sections.

How To Add a Section to Your Pinterest Board

If you don’t have time, I made a quick video to help you figure out Pinterest sections!

Step 1:

Pick the board you want to create sections for and add those sections. Click on ‘add sections’ and write your topic.

Step 2:

Add the section. Next, click on ‘organize up on top and select the pins you want for that section. Alternatively, you can find another board with a similar topic and find pins in that board by clicking ‘organize’ and picking pins there.

Step 3:

Click on ‘move’ and select the board and then select the section.

That’s it! Easy peasy!

Notes About Using Sections for Pinterest

If you decide to clean up boards, you may have to end up deleting a board.

Let me give you an example.

Say you have a Kitchen board, a kitchen accessories board and a kitchen DIY crafts board.

You can consolidate the accessory and DIY board into the main Kitchen board, leaving those two boards empty. You can then delete them.

Another point to be made:

Whenever you move a pin from a board into a section, that pin moved and is no longer on that board. If you don’t want this, here’s what you have to do:

When deciding on the pin to use for your section, instead of selecting ‘move,’ select, ‘copy.’

Next, select the board you want to move those copied pins to.

Now your original pins will remain on your board and placed on your main board. From here you can organize your pins, select the ones you copied and moved and place them in the section you want.

There Ya Go!

This is day 3 of 12 Days of Pinterest Tips to Grow Your Traffic, List, and Income! I hope you enjoyed it!

Tell me in the comments if you started using sections for your Pinterest boards and whether or not you find them helpful.

Please remember to pin me!

31 Comments

Can a subsection in Pinterest have a subsection? I have a section “Ethnic” and in it I have a subsection “Italian.“ I would like to add subsections to Italian for soups, sauces, etc. is that possible?

Hi Judy, If you’ve tried it before then yes I guess it would be!

Is it possible to add a board called “group board” then put all my group boards under that group as different sections?

I would advise against that. And I’m not sure you can move group boards into a section either!

Hi, I accidentally dragged one of my boards into another board, which made it into a section. Do you know how I can move the board (now a section) back out to be a board again in its own right? Thanks so much, this is great post!

Hi Anna, I’m not sure you can do that? You might have to leave it as a section or merge it with another section?

Hey Elna, I landed on your blog as I was looking for help re: sections. Here’s my prob: I have a style website/blog, and now belong to a blogging community. In order to promote each other, we pin each other’s pins to our own boards. Now, instead of having a style/fashion Pinterest acct., I have a hodge podge of all kindsa stuff! I kinda feel I am watering down my main interest/goal by having everyone else’s pins on my acct.—howev, I want to be a “good neighbor.” I was told I need to start a strictly personal acct w/ Pinterest and pin their stuff on my personal, having only style/fashion on my biz acct. Well, I did that. BUT, I’d really rather have all my stuff on the same acct, being that it’s already there and I don’t want the inconvenience of always having to log off one to login to the other. SO… how can I organize my boards to have all my style/fashion boards together in one place, and another place for the hodge podge? Do sections help with that? Of course, I want the primary function of my Pinterest to be style/fashion. My pinterest is https://www.pinterest.com/jerrycindydavis/ My blog is https://diybohemian.com/ Thnxomch for any help you can give me!!!! I can’t seem to get help with this!

Hi Cindy, Personally I don’t belong to blogging communities that do pin me and I’ll pin you stuff. This is exactly what ends up happening. I don’t want to pin things that have nothing relevant to my niche or audience. If I pin a makeup tutorial pin it won’t help me with my profile since my audience is more interested in financial planning and blogging. So what I would do is remove those pins from your boards and start fresh 🙂 Then remove yourself from those blogging communities. My Facebook group Mom to Mompreneur has promotional days but I don’t expect you have to comment or share others’ posts. It’s up to you if you want to!

HI! With regards to “board sections” can I move whole boards into a ‘general’ board? (ie have a ‘food’ board and then put my separate food-type boards all into the ‘food’ board? I have deserts, cauliflower, squash, to-go foods, etc. It would be great to have the one food board and all the others in it.) Many thanks, Caroline

Hi Caroline, If you have a general board like “food” and then break up that board into sections like “deserts” or “to-go foods” then that can totally work!

Hi, I’m loving your 12 days of Pinterest tips, thanks so much! I was an avid pinner before I started a blog, and now that I have changed to a business name, I’m trying to add keywords and make my boards more relatable to my blog and not just personal. I’m not sure I understand the advantage of sections compared to boards? Is it mostly a personal advantage – that you can organize and see all your pins in relation to an upcoming vacation or wedding, for example? Is there any advantage from a business perspective to using sections within a board rather than just creating lots of separate boards? Thanks!

Hi Gill, I personally use sections to help me find my pins more easily and to help pinners find my pins. So I put popular pins and categorize them. Businesses can do the same!

Do you know how to rearrange the Sections on a board? I started organizing my daughter’s Wedding Board, but would like to move her Dress and Cakes sections to the top. Right now, MOB dresses is first. YIKES!!!

Drag and drop ( place cursor on the section, press LEFT on mouse drag to where you want release, done.

Hi Ramona, I don’t think you can switch around your sections in your board? I couldn’t find a way? I’m sorry!

Great and informative post! I was wondering what these new sections were all about. But I’ve run into an issue. In trying to “copy” a pin for it to show up on both the divided section and the main board, I don’t see the options to “move,” “copy,” or “delete.” The picture you have above of the screen shot isn’t what my screen looks like when I got to select a pin or even when I’m selecting a pin that’s already on my board 🙁 What do ya think the issue is?

Hi Caroline, Thanks so much! I’m sorry you’re having problems. The options are on top of your profile and I have no idea why you don’t see them? Are you using your mobile? Try using a desktop instead or laptop?

Yeah, I’m using my desktop. But I’m not sure what the issue is either. I’ll try and figure it out tho. Again, great post!

Hi Elna! You’re tutorial was just what I was looking for! I’m looking to clean up my profile. I have several boards but want to consolidate the pins from all of them into one board with sections. I haven’t jumped into it because 1. I wasn’t sure what impact the move would have to those pins (in other words, if someone had pinned it, is that no longer valid?) and 2. What is the impact of deleting the empty boards from which I moved the pins? Any advice would be tremendously appreciated.

Hi Julie! Thanks so much and I’m so glad! If you want to clean up your boards, I would do it sparingly. I don’t think I mentioned it in the video but if you remove an entire board or boards, you remove those followers too. So your follower count may drop. If you move your pins to another board it will be valid from another pinner. And like I said, if you delete a board, you may lose followers but if you create a new boar to consolidate all your pins from other boards, you may make up for that loss? I honestly don’t know.

Hi Elna! I’m new to all of this and have a question about something in your Pin Promoting Planner. On the weekly planner, on Wednesday, you say to “Go to the board they pinned your pin and repin it.” Do this at least 5 times. For clarification, do you mean to go to their board and repin, or your board? You probably mean theirs, but how does this help them want to follow you when they see that it’s you who is repinning?

Hi Leslie, when you check your notifications you get to see where people pinned your pins. Go to those boards and repin them. They will get notified that YOU pinned from their board and my follow you. It’s just a little tactic that can help you grow your followers!

Ah, I see. I have done that but actually pinned one or more of their pins, or even followed one or more of their boards and several have followed me (I just started building my Pinterest content about a month ago.) It never occurred to me to repin what they saved of mine. I’ll try that! Thanks so much for your quick responses!

Hi Elna, Thanks so much for this, it’s really clarified things for me! Is it ok to pin something to more than one section within a board? For example, I have a makeup board which has several sections including makeup tutorials, and eye makeup. Is it ok to put an eye makeup tutorial on both sections, or will I be penalised in any way for that? Hope that makes sense! Thank you once again for your helpful posts 🙂 https://www.pinterest.co.uk/slightlysorted/ https://slightlysorted.com/

Hi Tara, That’s a great question. You may have to copy the original pin twice and then you can have two versions of it to place in sections. I don’t think you can copy a pin within a section. If you move it, you move the pin to a new section. Try and it and see!

I had no idea this existed!! Thanks! I’ve been wanting this kind of option for awhile – glad Pinterest has delivered. =)

Hi Kristen, You’re very welcome! Yes, Pinterest sections is a new thing! Try them out!

Awesome!! Thanks for clarifying!! I am loving this new organization!

Hi Renee, You’re welcome and thanks for stopping by!

I’ve created sections in a few of my boards. While it’s a nice feature I’ve read several places that sections don’t help you in the search results. Unless that changes I won’t be sectioning anymore of my boards.

Hi Leah, As of right now, the sections aren’t searchable on Pinterest but the board it’s on is! So if someone clicks to your board, they will see your section. It’s just another way to present information on your boards! I don’t section all my boards either; just a few main ones as a way to streamline my boards! Thanks for stopping by!