Today, the highly visual social media site, Pinterest, announced that they’ll be helping pinners find fun stuff like recipes, movies and products by creating ‘more useful’ pins; great news for social media and digital marketing practitioners.
They have new pin types for product pins (including pricing and where to buy things), recipe pins (including cook time, ingredients and number of servings) and movie pins (including cast and content ratings). This not only helps people find pins by this information — i.e. products in a certain price range or recipes containing certain ingredients — it helps the pin be more useful when they pin it. I may pin a neat pair of shoes or a tech gadget, but if I can’t easily find it to buy it, I’m frustrated and the manufacturer has lost a sale.
They’re actually retro-fitting older pins with this information from popular products, movie providers and recipe favorites. Check out an example, like this Oven Fried Chicken recipe from Chobani:
So how can vendors be ready for rich pins like this? Your web developer can add certain meta tags to your product pages to define URL, product title, price (all 3 are required) and may choose to add information like brand names, availability (in-stock vs. backorder), product description and more.
It gets a bit more complex when talking about variations of an item, like a t-shirt that comes in multiple colors. They provide full implementation details in their developer tools section. (They even offer a working example from Etsy.)
Pinterest for Business – which launched earlier this year – has been an effort to help products, businesses and content creators more easily connect with those that love/pin their content and send links back to their verified website. These new rich pins were announced as part of that suite of tools, which is (so far) free for businesses to use.
We’re digging in with some of our favorite manufacturers to test out rich product pins and we’ll report back soon!
Already rockin’ rich pins for your products, recipes or movies? Brag on yourself in the comments — we’d love to check ’em out!
We pin a lot of places: restaurants and brick-and-mortar stores. I hope Pinterest adds some sort of address option. Wouldn’t it be cool to search via city or “find near me”?
That would be cool! I wonder if Pinterest for Business has a suggestion box…