Pinterest has announced a very interesting new feature called “rich pins.” The idea is that instead of a pin being just an image and description, certain kinds of pins might include other specific information that always applies to those kinds of pins, and make the pins far more informative and therefore more useful. Initially, the kinds of pins that have this capability are Products, Recipes and Movies. And those are three huge categories! Pinterest also announced new support for pinning within mobile apps. Let’s take a quick look at each of these new types of pins, and how businesses can get started.
Products
The driving force behind Pinterest is sharing images of cool and interesting products, so this is a brilliant move. Now, when looking at a product pin, pinners will see pricing and availability, and where to buy that product. Pinterest is calling these “rich pins” and has already worked with a number of retailers to provide these useful pins:
Anthropologie, Asos, BHLDN, eBay, Etsy, Free People, Home Depot, Modcloth, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Overstock, REI, Sephora, Shopify shops, Shop Terrain, Sony, Target,Urban Outfitters, Walmart, Wayfair, Zulily
Recipes
Along with products, recipes and foods are a huge hit with pinners. Pinned recipes will now have cook time, ingredients and servings right on the pin. You will still need to visit the website to see the full recipe and instructions, but if you’re trying to choose a recipe based on ingredients or cook time, this will certainly speed your search. Pinterest has already signed up a ton of the top recipe websites, including:
101 Cookbooks, Better Homes and Gardens, Bon Appetit, Chobani, Country Living, Delish,Epicurious, Good Housekeeping, Leite’s Culinaria, Martha Stewart Living, MyRecipes,Naturally Ella, Nestlé Very Best Baking, Real Simple, Simply Recipes, Skinny Taste, The Girl Who Ate Everything, The Kitchn,What’s Gaby Cooking, Whole Foods Market, Woman’s Day
Movies
The Movie pins are really cool. Looking at a pin for one of my favorite movies, The Lord of the Rings, in addition to the gorgeous movie poster image, we get release date, rating, tomato score, director and featured cast members. Currently participating film buffs include:
Flixster, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes
Getting Started
In order to participate, there are some meta tags that you need to apply to your site, and then apply for approval. Once accepted, Pinterest will automatically scan and pull relevant data from your website. There does not appear to be any charge to businesses to participate.
This is obviously huge for any online retailer. Go to the Pinterest Rich Pins page immediately to start the process for getting your website configured and approved.
For products, Pinterest is supporting oEmbed and semantic markup (Schema.org and Open Graph). For most sites, I expect that Open Graph will be the easiest to implement. For each product within your site, you will need to add a series of og meta tags for specific attributes like price, description, etc. Open Graph is a format developed by Facebook, while Schema.org is a format developed by Google, and is slightly more complicated to implement. oEmbed is actually preferred as it is far more flexible and secure, but it is probably the most difficult of the three options to implement.
Recipe pins support Schema.org and hRecipe, while Movie pins support Schema.org only.
This is exactly what Facebook had hoped to do last year when they released Photo Collections, but that feature never really caught traction. The difference here is that people are already sharing and viewing product pins and businesses are already seeing sales as a result – this feature is simply designed to improve that process and hopefully drive more traffic and sales to participating businesses.
Mobile App Pinning
Pinterest has worked with a variety of businesses to bring pinning to the mobile app. These include:
Behance, Brit+Co, Etsy, Fotopedia, Jetsetter, Modcloth, Snapguide, TED, The North Face, and Zulily [all iTunes links]
Previously, pinning from mobile was only available on mobile websites, so this is yet another great option for online retailers who have an app and products people want to talk about.
These are some really interesting developments from Pinterest that I think a lot of businesses can take advantage of to get even more traffic and sales from the social network. What do you think? If you have an eCommerce site, will you be enabling these capabilities?