Following a Pinterest board vs following a profile: what actually changes in your feed
Published · Lucas Viegas · 6 min read
Following a board adds one board. Following a profile follows the person. Pinterest counts both the same way, and both feed the same home feed, which mixes Pins from people and boards you follow with Pins picked for you.
What follows is only what Pinterest publishes: where each control sits, what the help centre says reaches your feed, how to undo either one, and the questions it never answers. Every label below is Pinterest’s own, read on 7 September 2026.
What is the difference between following a board and following a profile?
Scope, and almost nothing else that Pinterest writes down. A board follow attaches to one board, a profile follow to the account, and both end in the same place: open your profile, click Following under your name, and the web shows people and boards together while the apps split them into People and Boards.
The arithmetic is the clearest statement Pinterest makes on the subject: your follower count is the number of people who follow you or your boards, and if someone follows one or more boards you created, it counts as one follow. Follow six of a person’s boards and you are still one follower.
How do you follow a board, and how do you follow a profile?
Two menus, two corners of the app. The board control hides behind an ellipsis; the profile control is a plain button.
- 1From your home feed, click into a Pin, then click the board title in the Username saved to Board title line at the bottom of the Pin.
- 2Or search: type a topic, press enter, then choose Boards from the menu to the right of the search bar. Pinterest notes that finding boards this way is currently available only on desktop.
- 3Follow the board. On desktop, click the ellipsis icon next to the board title and click Follow. In the apps, tap the ellipsis icon in the top right corner of the board and select Follow.
- 4To follow the profile instead, search a name or username, click the filter icon at the top left of the results, select Profiles, then Confirm on the web or View results in the apps. People with private profiles cannot be found this way.
- 5Open the profile and click Follow at the bottom of their profile description.
- 6Check the result under Following on your own profile, where Unfollow sits beside every entry.
What actually changes in your home feed?
Pinterest describes the home feed twice on one page, and the descriptions do not list the same ingredients. First: your Home feed is a feed of Pins picked for you based on the boards you create, the Pins you engage with and the things you search for. Then, a line later: browse your Home feed to discover Pins from people and boards you follow.
In the apps the feed has at least two tabs, All and Board, which Pinterest says are available in selected regions only. The All tab is where you land, and it carries the following feed alongside Pins picked for you. Those picked Pins are recommended, in Pinterest’s wording, based on the people you follow, the boards you create, the Pins you engage with and the things you search for.
Read that list slowly. The people you follow are named as a recommendation input. The boards you follow are not; the boards you create are. No weighting, ratio or before and after is published, so nobody can honestly say that one board follow moves your feed more or less than one profile follow. Pinterest documents the ingredients and keeps the recipe.
Board or profile: which one should you follow?
If one board is the reason you are there, follow the board: it is the narrower commitment, and it costs the person the same single follower either way. If you want everything they do, follow the profile, the only one of the two Pinterest names as a recommendation input.
| What is compared | Following a board | Following a profile |
|---|---|---|
| Where the control is | The ellipsis icon by the board title, then Follow | Follow, at the bottom of the profile description |
| How you get there | From a Pin, or the Boards filter in search | Search a name, then the Profiles filter |
| Where it lands | Following list, under Boards in the apps | Following list, under People in the apps |
| Their follower count | One follow, however many of their boards | One follow |
| A named recommendation input | No. Pinterest names the boards you create | Yes, the people you follow |
| How you undo it | Following list, then Unfollow | Following list, then Unfollow |
| Limits | A cap on stored follows, number unpublished | Same cap, but people who follow you stay available |
How do you unfollow, and what can you not fix that way?
Unfollowing is one click from Following on your profile. Removing a follower is the mirror image: open Followers, click the ellipsis icon beside the name, choose Remove and confirm. Blocking goes further and stops someone following you, messaging you or interacting with your Pins; Pinterest adds that a blocked person’s Pins leave your home feed but may still turn up in search results and group boards, and that Pins you already saved from them stay on your profile. Nobody is ever told they were blocked.
For the feed itself there is a separate screen, Refine your recommendations, with tabs for Activity or Pins, Boards, Interests, Following and, depending on platform, AI content or GenAI interests. Its Following tab exists to review and edit who you follow. Two useful details from that page: recommendations are automatically turned off for archived boards and secret boards, which carry a lock in the Boards tab, and turning recommendations off does not change the ads you see.
What the help centre does not document: whether unfollowing a board also detaches you from the profile, whether the owner is notified when you follow one of their boards (there is a Followers notification category for email and push, but nothing that ties it to boards), how a board follow and a profile follow are weighted against each other, and how many follows the account limit actually allows. It says only that a limit exists, that unfollowing frees room, and that you can keep following people who already follow you.
Does following change who can see a board?
No. Following is about your feed. Visibility is a different switch entirely, and it lives in the board’s own settings: public boards are visible on your profile and in search, private boards only to you and the collaborators you invite. If you are weighing that up, the secret versus public boards post covers the flip in detail, the guide to who sees what you save goes setting by setting, and group boards add collaborators to the same question. To open a board up, making a Pinterest board public is the step by step.
That distinction is why VisionWall, a macOS menu-bar app that turns any public Pinterest board into a live, rotating desktop wallpaper, does not care whether you follow the board. You give it the board’s URL, it needs no Pinterest account, new pins appear automatically, and the masonry composition is reshuffled on each refresh, every 30 minutes by default and anywhere from 2 minutes to 2 hours. It can only read a public board, so the visibility setting, not the follow, decides whether it works at all. $9.99 once, on macOS 13.3 (Ventura) or later.
Questions people ask about following boards and profiles
Does following a Pinterest board also follow the person?
The help centre does not say that it does. They are two separate controls, and both land in the same Following list. What Pinterest does document is the counting: if someone follows one or more boards you created, it counts as one follow of you.
Will someone know if I follow their board?
Undocumented. Pinterest has a Followers notification category for email and push, but the help pages never say whether a board follow fires it, or whether it names the board.
Does following a board change my home feed?
Pinterest says the home feed is where you discover Pins from people and boards you follow, and that its picked-for-you Pins are based on the people you follow, the boards you create, the Pins you engage with and what you search for. No weighting is published, so a board follow feeds in without a stated size.
How do I see everything I am following?
Open your profile and click Following under your name. The web list mixes people and boards; the apps separate them into People and Boards, with Unfollow beside each entry.
Does following a board let an app read it?
No. Following changes your feed, not the board’s visibility. An app that is not signed in as you can read a board only when it is public, which is a separate switch in the board’s own settings.
Which Pinterest pages were checked for this post?
All read on 7 September 2026.
- Find boards on Pinterest
- Find and follow people
- Manage your following and followers
- Explore the home feed
- Your Pinterest home screen
- Refine your recommendations
- Manage your boards
- Find your profile
- Make your profile private or public
- Block or unblock someone
- Edit notification settings
- Limits for Pins, boards and follows