How to Use Pinterest for Personal Use

Pinterest is a bulletin board for pictures and articles found on the web. It is also a network for sharing these things with others, but differs from other social media platforms in that it’s more about sharing ideas than conversation! Read on to learn more about how to use Pinterest for personal use.

What can I do on Pinterest?

Pinterest is where people go to discover new things from across the web. It is a fantastic tool for finding inspiration, ideas, and tutorials that have already been given a thumbs-up, a pin, by many others. Think of it as a curated, visual search engine!

Pinterest is a visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration, and more. With billions of Pins on Pinterest, you’ll always find ideas to spark inspiration. When you discover Pins you love, save them to boards to keep your ideas organized and easy to find.

Pinterest Help Center

Whether you’re looking for new recipes, to learn a new skill, travel inspiration, or to create a mood board before decorating a room; Pinterest has it all. 

You can follow artists and designers for inspiration, pinning examples of their work that inspire you, creating a virtual mood board. 

You can find step by step tutorials for hobbies, recipes, apps and software. Learn a new skill, improve your technique, or find a new tool to expand your knowledge. 

You can plan your vacation, read travel guides, blog posts, recommendations, activity ideas, travel hacks, and more.

How do I create boards?

But, how do you do all that? As a personal user, you create a profile first (this tutorial from GCF Learn Free takes you through the steps). Then, when you log in you will see your homepage, where you will see a feed of suggested pins. These will be from the people you follow and ones that Pinterest thinks you’ll be interested in. You can also use the search function to find content or other pinners to follow. 

Once you have found this information, you will want to save it so that you can refer to it later. Pinterest is perfect for this part too!

The first thing you will need to do is create Boards. Think of these as bulletin boards, or folders, each for a particular topic, e.g. recipes, crafts, travel, or beauty. This tutorial from GCF Learn Free explains how to create your first board.

What next?

Once you have some boards, you can Pin individual items to them, which means save a photo or an article to the board. You can save these ideas from Pinterest, or from anywhere around the web. We will explain this process in more detail in our upcoming blog post How to Pin.

You can then use these boards of pins for reference in the future.

Using Pinterest for planning

Say you are taking a vacation. You’ve decided where you’re going, but what are you going to do once you’re there? You can read the travel guides, but how do you evaluate and organize all of the material you find. Are you a solo traveler, or a couple, or a family? 

Chances are someone who has the same requirements as you has been there, done that, and there’s also a good chance they’ve posted their advice online. Travel bloggers provide a wealth of real person, honest advice for fellow travelers. This is where Pinterest can be both a gold mine of information and also a perfect place for you to collate what you have found.

As you can see from the image above, a search on the word travel brings up a wide variety of content. Pinterest will also suggest ways to refine your search. The colored tabs at the top of this image give keywords such as destination, tips, USA, adventure, and even packing, to help you get to the content you’re looking for. And on Pinterest, each pin is represented by an image so that you can identify it at a glance.

You can collect your ideas onto Boards to review later, and the more you pin of a certain type of content, the more ideas Pinterest will show you on that topic. 

Using Pinterest for inspiration

Or, imagine you are organizing a party. A search for party food will get you started – and will likely start off with seasonal ideas until you refine your search further!

You can gather ideas for food, cakes, favors, décor etc. all together on a board called Party. Then as the day of the party approaches, you can easily find that recipe or craft idea or color scheme, by simply going back to your Board and browsing through the ideas that you pinned. You don’t have to begin your search again.

And, the beauty of using Pinterest to find and collect those ideas is that they have already been vetted by others, and deemed good enough to pin in the first place!  It is as though someone else has already tested out all of the search engine results and is only showing you the ones that really turned out to be valuable.