Plain vs. Rich Pins on Pinterest

February 24, 2014 by Christine

We’ve talked about adding Pin It buttons to your website as a means of enticing Pinterest users to pin images from your website. This is a great way to get exposure on Pinterest as well as divert traffic back to your website. However, did you know that you can set up your images so that when they’re pinned on Pinterest they automatically display information such as pricing and inventory levels right on Pinterest. In order to do this, you’ll need to use “Rich Pins.”

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What are Rich Pins?

Rich pins are available for products, movies, articles, places, and recipes. Assuming you sell products, consider creating “rich” product pins. By creating rich pins instead of just adding a Pin It button, when Pinterest users pin your images, dynamic information appears on your pins. If you change your prices, for example, your rich pins should reflect those changes. In contrast, if a user pinned a product and mentioned the item’s price in the description field or a comment, that information would remain in place unless the user changes it.

Rich pins give you greater control over some of the details associated with your products, recipes, or movie images. In addition, they have a direct link to the referenced image’s page. For example, a rich pin of one of your products will link directly to that product’s page whereas a regular pin would link to your home page.

How to Get Rich Pins

In order to start using rich pins, you’ll need to head over to the developers section of Pinterest and read the documentation. Here’s the link: http://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/

Implementing rich pin functionality on your website does require adding markup code to your site. You can use either oEmbed or Semantic Markup. You’ll also need to use the “rich pins validator” to validate your site after you’ve added the markup code to it. The validator is found in the Pinterest for Developers section. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as copying and pasting an embed code. In fact, you’ll also need to get Pinterest’s approval before your rich pins begin appearing as rich pins.

How to Opt Out of Rich Pins

While implementing rich pins and encouraging pinning are beneficial for many website owners, some may prefer to opt out of rich pins or pinning in general. Do ensure that your pages do not render as rich pins, add this line to the HTML head section of your webpages:

<meta name=”pinterest-rich-pin” content=”false” />

Prefer to restrict all pinning? Use the “nopin” tag which is:

<meta name=”pinterest” content=”nopin” />

If you want greater control over the images on your site that end up on Pinterest, rich pins are worth considering. For those who prefer not to let people pin their images, the tags mentioned above can prevent them from doing so.

To learn more about Rich Pins, visit business.pinterest.com/rich-pins.

by Thomas von Ahn – Chief Elephant Slayer – Viral Solutions LLC

Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: pinterest, social media strategy