How to Conduct a Pinterest Audit & Pin With Purpose

I’ve mentioned several times that Pinterest is by far my favorite social network. Its visual interface makes it easy and fun to find awesome looking articles and save them for later. However it can be way too easy to get carried away occasionally, and that’s when you end up with 8,000 pins and 70 boards.

And yes, that’s the real life number of how many pins and boards I had on my own Pinterest up until this week.

How on earth did I have well over 8,000 pins, you ask? Well, from four years of mindless binge-pinning, that’s how! But you can’t be mindless anymore when you’re trying to run a business with your social media.

That’s why this blog post today is important. You may be thinking “A Pinterest audit? Is this lady forreal?”

Yes, my friend. I am forreeeeal. (I hope all of you have “I’m Sorry Miss Jackson” stuck in your head now. You are so welcome.)

Sure, this may not be necessary for all of you. But if you’re like me and have overused your personal Pinterest account for too long and now you need to clean it up for your business, then this most definitely is necessary for you. If you, too, have a ridiculous amount of pins and boards, then follow along with me as I explain how to conduct a Pinterest audit and how I personally went from 8,000 pins and 70 boards to 4,000 pins and 25 boards.

1. Make a plan for your pin boards.

First of all, if you have more pins/boards than I did, I definitely want to hear about it. You might be the Guinness World Record Breaker.

Second of all, I want you to sit and think about what you did that got you to this outrageous number of pins. Have you just had your Pinterest account since the day Pinterest launched? Or are you a victim of binge-pinning like me? (Victim probably isn’t the proper word to use in this scenario…binge-pinning is most definitely a conscious choice.)

Either way, your new clients and readers aren’t going to want to look through five million pins in order to find what they need. Take this time to decide which boards need to stay, which boards you might even need to add in order to provide plenty of information about your niche, and which boards are just plain overkill. (I seriously had like ten different boards full of recipes. Why??)

2. Delete all of the boards that you no longer need.

I want to preface this with a warning: by deleting entire boards, you could potentially be losing people that were only following those particular boards. Sure, this can hurt your numbers (I personally lost a little over 100 followers), but if they were following boards that don’t really pertain to your business, then they weren’t really followers that were going to help you specifically.

I started by deleting boards with the smallest number of pins that I knew I wouldn’t miss. Then I consolidated other boards (like putting my various boards for each room in a house together in one board called “Home”) before deleting the rest.

3. Audit the boards you decide to keep.

This is a two-part step:

First, go through the boards that will stay and delete all pins are really aren’t that visually appealing. If they don’t catch your eye or you’re really not sure why you pinned it in the first place, then it needs to go.

Second, go through the pins that have passed the test to make sure that all of the links are working. Having pins with broken links is a quick way to get other pinners annoyed with you.

4. Make sure that all of your pins are in the right places.

I found a pin for organizing crafts in my blogging board. Seriously, how did that even get in there? That was obviously the result of some 2AM pinning.

Sidenote: Stop the 2AM pinning. At that point, your pinning with purpose has gone down the drain and you really should be asleep anyways.

5. Make sure that the majority of your boards focus on your blog/biz niche.

You want to focus on your personal niche when you’re pinning. If you’re a wedding planner, you’ll probably want your top two rows of boards to be dedicated to the various parts of a wedding. However, if you’re a business consultant, you only need one wedding board, tops.

Create any other boards that you may need in order to delve into further depth of your business niche, then pin a few things just to quickly fill up each board. (Remember only to pretty images with working links to useful blog posts!)

Take your time with your Pinterest audit–it’s a slow process, but it’s really going to help you to point your Pinterest in the right direction for your business. I spent several hours auditing my own Pinterest throughout the week, so it’s okay to work on your own audit whenever you have the time.

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(Maybe the next time you get the urge to binge-pin, you can binge-audit instead!)

After your audit, you want to make sure that you don’t fall back into the same habits again. Think of this like a Pinterest rehab of sorts.

First of all, if you’re serious about your business, you need to put the time that you might otherwise spend binge-pinning towards your business instead. Second of all, you need to be purposeful in your pinning.

1. Stop opening Pinterest every time you get a spare moment.

Better yet, just completely delete the app on your phone or bury it in some hard-to-find folder. Using Pinterest as a distractor encourages mindless scrolling and pinning, sometimes of things that don’t actually fit into your brand or that you just don’t need.

This is how you end up with thousands of useless and irrelevant pins that your audience just plain doesn’t care about. (Sorry ’bout it, guys, but it’s the truth.)

2. Brand your board covers.

I’ve talked about this more thoroughly in my post on branding your social media, but I’ll touch on it again. Branding each of your social media, including your Pinterest–and yes, even your Pinterest boards–is crucial for keeping a cohesive brand throughout your business.

You have two options for branding your board covers: either create your own graphics or choose covers that fit with your brand (for example, using pops of neon or a lot of white space and pastels if one of those aesthetics matches your blog).

3. Choose your business boards based on what your audience wants.

My own boards that pertain to my niche consist of my blog posts, blogging, my collaborative creative biz board, social media marketing, home office, business, fonts, and design. However, I plan to add a board dedicated to each social network, an email marketing board, and a PPC advertising board, just to encompass as much information about digital marketing as I can.

Your job is to understand who your audience is and what they want to see. Then to create boards and save pins catering specifically to your audience’s needs.

If you create organic beauty supplies, then you should have boards pertaining to natural and sustainable living. If you offer cleaning services, then you should have boards about easy cleaning hacks and DIY two-step cleaning methods.

4. Only save pins that grab attention.

If you saw an image that caused you to stop scrolling or made your jaw drop because it’s so gorgeous, that’s the type of pin that you need to be saving to your own boards. You want your audience’s attention to stop on your pins.

Rather than saving a bunch of mediocre pins, only save a few stellar pins. Quality over quantity on your business Pinterest.

5. Plan & schedule your pins.

Set aside a certain part of your day just for pinning. Decide what you’re going to pin that day and how many pins you’re going to save.

For example, perhaps you’re going to save 10 pins from your followers’ recipe boards. Or perhaps you’re going to save 15 pins from your influencers’ business boards.

Get on Pinterest, save your pins, then get back to other business stuff. Don’t allow Pinterest to be the time suck that it used to be.

And to make your pinning even easier, Buffer is not partnering with Pinterest to offer pin scheduling! I love this because I always schedule/post my own blog promos before I go to work, but Pinterest does best at night. This means that I previously would have to remember to go back at a later time in order to pin my post. I don’t have to worry about that anymore now that I can also schedule my pins.

6. Only follow your influencers.

If you follow…well…everybody, you’re going to end up with a home feed with thousands of irrelevant pins. If you follow only influencers in your niche, then you’ll only end up with top notch content that you and your readers/clients are actually interested in.

Keep your home feed clean and easy to navigate by following just a few of the best.

P.S. What are your tips for pinning with purpose?

P.P.S. How to Gain More Pinterest Followers & 7 Ways to Use Pinterest Messaging for Business