Spring Cleaning Your Pinterest Boards
I'm not going to lie, I'm addicted to Pinterest. I could browse pins on my iPad for hours and sometimes use it as a primary search tool. For me it’s convenient to pin recipes in one place and come back to when I need meal planning inspiration or collaborate with my sister to plan my nephew's 2nd birthday. But when you pin as much as I do, for 3+ years, your boards can get cluttered and the original intention of a pin can get lost. Pinterest can be more than a time waster if you use it to your advantage and give it the occasional spring cleaning.
Get Detail Oriented I first started with a 'bites' board for everything culinary but soon there are so many pins that you miss things. I broke my bites category into ‘breakfast' for everything morning eats related, ‘confections' for my sweet tooth and ‘sip on this’ for my smoothie and juice obsession. Each of my 44 boards has a purpose which keeps my browsing time limited when I’m looking for a recipe for Sunday Brunch.
Delete Pins Just like your closet, sometimes you really just need to purge. Every couple months or so, I’ll look over my boards and delete pins that aren’t relevant. This is most useful on my 'nerding out' board where I keep things such as infographics of social media platform specs. Once that new timeline or design hits though, it's irelevant and can only get confusing.
Determine the Purpose When you create a new board, will it be to pull inspiration or hold references for you to get back to you? I recently made this realization reviewing my ‘keetchin’ board. It began as a way to purge my homebody board that held decor inspiration, but now I see that I’ve added cooking tips and gadgets that can improve my kitchen skills. To build upon my collection and keep my boards clean, I now have added ‘sharpen my skills’ to hold all those tips for storing vegetables, how to cut an onion and those adorable salt n’ pepper shakers.
Unfollow Deleting friends or unfollowing accounts can have a bad reputation these days but when material is irrelevant to you, it clutters up space. When someone I follow starts mass pinning items that I don’t have interest in, I’ll look at their whole board and determine if it’s worth unfollowing. Most of the time it is and by just unfollowing their board and not the whole account I still receive content I’ll want to re-pin to my own account.
Have Mindless Fun It’s true what they say, you can spend hours on Pinterest. For someone in the social media profession, it’s the one network where I can get lost and think creatively. To support that fun thought process, I create boards that are just mindless fun and when you go back to look at the collection you’ve built it can spark a new idea. Some include: a collection of ‘B’s’, anything related to my hometown, DIY projects and all things winosaur.
Happy Spring Cleaning!