A Complete Guide To Pinterest Rich Pins With Free Tools

14th Feb 2014 Social Media | 26 Comments 8 minutes to read

Pinterest’s power has rapidly grown over the past year where the image-based social network has driven the highest percentage of traffic and sales especially for Retailers. It’s no longer seen as just a silly image gallery, Pinterest really does have commercial potential.

Retailers clearly understand the power of Pinterest as when looking at the top 100 retailers 30% of them have already implemented Rich Pins. Plus the percentage rises to 42% when looking at the top 50 retail companies (source).

So there is really no reason why you shouldn’t give Rich Pins a go.If you haven’t heard of Rich Pins and the benefits then read on so you don’t miss out.

Rich Pins Explained

Rich Pins, also known as ‘Super Pins’ or ‘Enhanced Pins’ are a fairly new addition to Pinterest features for business. These enhanced pins show viewers more information than usual pins making them more powerful for businesses.

In the simplest way, Rich Pins work the same as Schema does for your website; they highlight additional information which can be displayed in the Pinterest Pin Feed, underneath the pinned image. Therefore Rich Pins will not only display the image but also additional information such as description, price, stock availability, location or more. Such richer pins can then appear as more relevant and useful to the pinners who can reward your hard work by clicking on your pin, repining or liking it.

5 Top Reasons why you need to use Rich Pins

Okay so Rich Pins looks better than the usual ones but how do these enhanced pins affect your business? Well, read on as you might be surprised what this additional information underneath your pin can help you with.

1. Automatic Updates

Whenever you change something on your website, for example the price of a product or adding ingredient to your Recipe this information will be automatically updated on the pin as well. No manual changes needed!

2. More useful information

Pinners/users can easily see additional information about the pin making it more useful and relevant. Image as well as text-based content in a pin can increase relevancy which in turn can lead to more informed decisions.

3. Free Price Alerts

I think this feature is one of the best Pinterest adds-on. If you decrease the price of your products by more than 10% Pinterest will send an automated email about the price drop to the people who pinned your product. This is all done for free!

4. Traffic Boost

Target worked together with Pinterest to trial the Rich Pins for their products. These pins included the additional information such as price and product availability. After implementation of these pins Target experienced a massive increase (+70%) in traffic from Pinterest. I guess that’s a pretty good reason why you should implement Rich Pins, especially if you’re an ecommerce business.

5. Increase in Sales

More traffic, free email notifications about price drops and more information underneath the pin can have a positive effect on your bottom line. Just imagine if your product was pinned by 500+ people and you dropped the price by over 10%… 500 price drop notifications in your potential customers’ mailbox.

Rich Pin Types

You can currently implement 5 kinds of Rich Pins; Place, Article, Product, Recipe and Film Pins.

Place Pins

If you use the Place pin you can highlight information such as showing a map and address as well as phone number. Place Pins are perfect for travel enthusiast and travel brands. These pins form an interactive map board where you can see the pins by location.

You can create Place boards that reflect your business, for example top burgers, running rotes, top bars, best hikes, and more. Place pins should be a must for companies with franchises/agents across many cities or even countries; such as Restaurants, Wedding organisers, and more. Here’s a great example of how these Place Pins are used;

• A Chicago Pork and Whiskey Tour created by Thrillist
• GastronomicTravel Board created by Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts

Pinterest have already partnered up with companies such as Airbnb, Foursquare, Citysearch, and more in order to automatically include location info on their Pins.

You can learn more about the Place pins as well as how they are used by companies on the Pinterest site.

Product Pins

Implementing Product Pins is a must for any ecommerce business as these pins allow you to highlight the Current Price, Availability and Where to buy. As a bonus you will also get free price notifications alerting pinners that you’ve dropped the price (explained in more detail later in the post).

Below is an example of an enhanced Product Pin from Nordstrom

Article Pins

Article pins enable you to provide your readers with more information about your blog post/article than just an image. You can highlight Author, Article Title, Description as well as URL. As a bonus Pinterest will add automatic CTA for your pin, such as ‘Read this on …’

Check out the BBC and its Article Rich Pin below;

Recipe Pins

Recipe pins are great if you are a business operating in food industry or have a blog where you regularly share your culinary recipes. Rich pins will definitely help you bring your Recipe/Food pins to the next level; you will be able to display recipe details including cooking time, ingredients, servings, description, ratings as well as related recipes (which must be from the same domain name).

Your ‘normal’ food pins will be transferred into delicious-looking images with useful information underneath.

The Woman’s Day Pinterest account has a lot of great Recipe Pins;

Film Pins

With Enhanced Film pins you can mark-up movie details such as Release date, Actors and Ratings.

Netflix has already mastered this feature;

Rich Pins Implementation

Similarly to Schema mark-ups, successful implementation of Rich Pins requires a bit of coding. You will need to manually amend the specific Rich Pins templates so they correspond with the data on your website and then upload it to your website’s code.

Rich Pins are available only for business accounts, however if you’re a blogger using personal Pinterest profiles you can easily upgrade to a business account. This will take you only a couple of clicks;

• Login and click on the Menu icon in the top right corner. Then click on ‘Businesses’ and ‘Convert Here’

• In the next window, fill out all the information, accept the terms and click on Convert. That’s it; although you might need to verify your account if you haven’t done it before. This can be done either by uploading a verification file to your website or adding a Meta tag to your HTML code before the </head> tag.

1. Pick the right Rich Pin type and the mark-up method

There are two methods you can use to implement Rich Pins; oEmbed or Semantic Markup (Schema.org or Open Graph templates).

Below are the tags you will need to add to your page’s code so the information can be displayed underneath the pinned image;

Here are the methods you can use as well the tags for specific Rich Pins;

• Product Pins details
• Place Pins details
• Movie Pins details
• Article Pins details
• Recipe Pins details

If you have a site build on WordPress than the Open Graph tags should be added automatically. Although, I would recommend installing powerful plugins such as Yoast SEO. Once downloaded and installed, go to plugin Settings and click on ‘Social’. Now tick the box that says ‘Add Open Graph Meta data and you’re good to go.

However, there a lot of additional tags you can also add; these are not required and if you want to use these you will need to manually add them to your code.

For example, if you would like to mark-up image, published time, article tag/keyword you will need to add these to the code. You will find the full list of additional tags for all the types of Rich Pins on the Pinterest developers page.

Free Tools – Rich Pins Plugins for WordPress

There are already a few free and paid plugins you can use to simplify Pinterest Rich Pins integration on your website;

• ABG Rich Pins (free) will add information about Movies, Products and Recipes
• WooCommerce Rich Pins plugin (paid) supports Product pins
• WP Open Graph plugin (free) will add the Open Graph tags to any of your pages or posts

2. Validation

Once you implement all the suggested tags you will need to validate the page by adding the URL to Pinterest Validator.

I’ve tested the Open Graph method on my WordPress blog and validated a couple of my recent blog posts;

On the left hand side you can see what tags have been recognised; it shows that my blog post is missing the ‘Authors’ tag;

If your implementation was successful you can click on ‘Apply Now’.  I thought Pinterest would let me know once they were implemented however there was no email or notification coming my way. So I waited…

Do I need to validate every page to make sure Rich Pins are enabled?

I asked myself the same question but couldn’t find the answer to that. So I’ve recently published a new blog post and pinned it to my Pinterest account without using the Pinterest Validator and surprise, surprise my mark-up data showed up;

So I guess once you validate a couple of pages (I did validate 3 latest blog posts) Rich Pins will be enabled for your website.

Rich Pins for Shopify Shop

You can apply Rich Pins to your Products on Shopify too – here’s a quick guide on how to apply these  for your products.

Are you using Rich Pins? Have you got any tips how to quickly implement them? Have you experienced any effects of Rich Pins on your traffic, engagement or bottom line? I would love to hear your thoughts, tips or ideas. 

Image Credits

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