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What are Pinterest Rich Pins?

Pinterest has introduced an extremely valuable tool called "Rich Pins" for businesses looking to drive traffic and sales to their websites. Rich Pins allows businesses to add extra valuable information and content to photos pinned from their website. This information is automatically added when items are pinned (or re-pinned) from the original website that has implemented rich pin functionality.

Pinterest currently supports the following  types of "Rich Pins":

  1. Product Rich Pins - include real time pricing, item availability and a link to the online store so users may buy the product.

    Online retailers should definitely try to take advantage of product rich pins as a method of driving sales. The most valuable feature of product rich pins is that users who have pinned the item get email notifications when the pinned item drops in price. So a user that might have admired an item at a higher price, will get an automatic notification of any price drops via Pinterest, and this might prompt them to actually purchase the item.

    Sample Product Rich Pins (click an individual pin to see the full rich pin)
     
  2. Article Rich Pins - the added information include headline, author and story description, which can help users find and save stories of interest to them.

    This type of rich pin can be valuable for bloggers, content creators, and those that generate photo based "how to" articles. One should remember that Pinterest pins revolve around pinning photos - so the article should have a compelling photo associated with it. For example, if the article is explaining "how to build" something, a photo of the completed project should be included.

    Sample Article Rich Pins (click an individual pin to see the full rich pin)
     
  3. Recipe Rich Pins - include ingredients, cooking times and serving information.

    These recipe rich pins can be valuable on cooking blogs, recipe sites, restaurant sites, and food oriented shopping sites. You get to see the photo of the finished recipe, and see all the ingredients under the photo.

    Sample Recipe Rich Pins (click an individual pin to see the full rich pin)
     
  4. Place Rich Pins - include a map, address, and phone number.

    These pins are particularly valuable for vacation and travel destination websites.

    Sample Place Rich Pins (click an individual pin to see the full rich pin)
     
  5. Movie Rich Pins - include ratings, cast members and reviews to help Pinners learn about new flicks.

    These niche pins would be appropriate for film focused websites that review or discuss movies.

    Sample Movie Rich Pins (click an individual pin to see the full rich pin)

Steps for Getting Rich Pins on your website:

  • STEP 1 - Make sure you have signed up for a business account, or convert your personal account to a business account. Business accounts are free.

  • STEP 2 - Implement passing additional pin content via oEmbed (preferred) or Semantic Markup (Schema.org or Open Graph metatags)

    I would say that using a web developer like Pallasart Web Design to implement rich pins is highly recommended for non-technical users.

    Here is the documentation for implementation:

    https://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/

  • STEP 3 - Validate your Rich Pins and apply to get them on Pinterest:

    https://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/validator/

    I would recommend "validating and applying for" a handful of rich pins. Provided you have correctly implemented rich pins it should NOT be necessary to validate each and every single rich pin - once approved for your website, new pinnable items that correctly pass "rich pin" meta data should show up as rich pins without validating and applying.

  • STEP 4 - Wait patiently for Pinterest to approve and enable "rich pins" for your website. It can easily take around 2 weeks for Pinterest to enable your rich pins after validation and application.

    To check and see the current status of your application, try validating the pin via the link in Step 3 - once approved, the message will change to
     
    "Congratulations! Your rich pins are approved and on Pinterest"

Get Rich Pins on Pinterest

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