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Why Businesses Need to use Rich Pins for Pinterest Immediately

Nordstroms Pinterest

 

Pinterest has recently been working with some companies that provide online e-commerce sales. What’s fantastic about this is that it provides information about the product without actually requiring them to be typed into the description and therefore you never have to worry about another pinner changing the description without listing the vital information (a concern for major brands).

This availability of information is vital and is known as rich pins (most likely taken from the term rich snippets, a common term used when marketers talk about search engine optimization.)

Pinterest has allowed for three different categories of rich pins, and they are, movies, recipes, and products, and will definitely be a great add on to the Pintalysis, a Pinterest marketing blueprint for businesses.


Rich Pins for Products Will Change E-commerce

Probably the one that will interest most readers is the rich pins for product because it affects many e-commerce sites. Rich pins has already been used on Pinterest pages like Sephora and Etsy’s.

Rich pins will be able to tell a viewer on Pinterest real time pricing, whether it’s available in stock, and which website to buy it from (or that it’s available in stores). The other nice feature is that a businesses logo is now added to the side. But you do have to apply to Pinterest to be able to offer rich pins for your account, so whether you run a store that’s dedicated to shoes like Zappos, or run an online store dedicated to aprons, rich pins are vital.


No More Price Tags in the Top Right Corner

Another change for pins is that pricing used to be tagged automatically on the top right hand side of a pin when a dollar amount was listed in the description. This is no longer the case. A user can still post pricing in the description but no more price tags will show. In the case of rich pins, the pricing will show at the bottom of the pin at the left hand side, but only after the product pin has been clicked on.

Why this is of particular help to businesses is because it used to be difficult to provide all that data in the description of the pin without worrying that the information would change after being repinned a few dozen times.

Now if an item is listed as out of stock, then users will most likely know not to click on it, because there’s the potential that it’s going to lead to a broken link, but at least the user has been “warned” in some fashion so it doesn’t disrupt the user’s expectation.

Since this rich pin data can’t be changed by users, that means that when any Pinterest user pins from a Pinterest approved e-commerce site, that specific rich pin data can only be changed by webmasters or developers.

The problem for businesses before was that when pins were taken off a site or repinned their descriptions could be changed, and tampered with. So people could purposely put the wrong price if they wanted to in the description and then go to the site, and realize that it was much more expensive. Now with rich pins, a user can trust that the price listed is most likely the right price.

Another great feature is that it also allows users to know that this pin is officially from the site, and that it doesn’t lead to copycat retailer that’s making fakes of a brand. If you haven’t verified your e-commerce or business site on Pinterest yet, then I highly suggest that you do.

The good news is that when you do put a price for your product in the description of the pin, it will still automatically go into the Gifts section of the Pinterest search.

If you want to implement rich pins, then scroll down to near the end of the article.


Rich Pins are Available for Movies

Rich pins are also available for movies, and is able to offer details such as the appropriate viewing age for the movie, as well as information such as who the director is, and who is starring in it, and rating for the movie. For Netflix’s Pinterest account it gives you some great details before you click to visit their site.


Recipe Pins Will Do Wonders for Food Brands and Bloggers

With a little creativity, you can get your food brand to be on Pinterest as well. Here’s an example of a recipe for oven fried chicken from Chobani (a yogurt company.) As you can see the rich pin for recipes offers a lot of great information that ranges from how many people it serves, what type of ingredients you need, and how long it takes to cook.

What’s really smart about this for food brands is that rich pins don’t tell you step by step on how to cook the food, so viewers that are interested in executing the recipe have to click on the pin, which will lead back to the main website.

Oven Fried Chicken


How To Implement Rich Pins for Your Site

Most of Pinterest has been fairly non technical I would say, and now with the options of rich pins, you’re most likely going to need your developer to help you out if you’re not technically savvy.

I want to make it clear that I’m personally not a developer, so I won’t be able to offer technical advice. They are scraping data from sites that use oEmbed, Shchema.org tags, as well as Open Graph tags.

But if you would like to get all the details of how to implement the technical work, Pinterest has a post dedicated to developers regarding rich pins. And you still need to go through the approval process with Pinterest before you can do what the other brands like Nordstroms and Sephora have done. Pinterest has provided a rich pin tester to test out your code to see if it works.

Also if you find yourself wanting to listen about the changes that have recently happened, Cynthia Sanchez from Oh So Pinteresting, created a podcast about the changes.

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Written by Vincent NG

I’m a social media marketer, particularly for Pinterest, It all started back in 2010 when Pinterest was in beta. It was the fastest independent website to get 10 million unique visitors in the U.S. This really struck a chord with me, and it was then that I knew that Pinterest was going to be a powerhouse in the world of digital and social media marketing.