Contents
What are Pinterest Rich Pins?
Pinterest is an interactive pin-board where you can digitally “pin” your images and videos. A Rich Pin is essentially a super pin – it includes more information taken from the data provided by the website owner from where the image was pinned.
It’s far easier to show you than explain! So here is a pin from here on the blog with article rich pin mark-up
A pin with article rich pin mark-up
And here’s a screen-shot of my board “Blogs that caught my eye”
Pins with no rich pin mark-up
Can you see the difference? My pin has information about where it is pinned from right under the image and the article title in bold. (I really will have to get to updating the fav icon!) Even more – when you click on my pin the meta description of the article is shown. Now I really will need to stop being lazy and make sure I add a description to each article!
Rich pins are only available to Pinterest business accounts. You can convert your current Pinterest account to a business account easily (instructions in this post – How to Use Pinterest for Local Business Marketing) or join Pinterest as a business
Information you can provide in a rich pin
There are currently five types of rich pin:
- movie – includes ratings, cast members and reviews
- recipe – includes ingredients, cook time and serving info
- product – includes real time pricing, availability and where to buy
- article – includes headline, author and description
- place – includes map, address and phone number
You can apply to have one type of rich pin data applied to pins from your website – so choose carefully! Because the additional information comes with the image when it is pinned, it is permanent. Pinners and repinners cannot change it.
Along with Place pins you can create Place Boards on Pinterest and map your images and videos of interest. I’ll show you how to create Place boards in the next post.
A Pinterest Place board with map pins
I hope now you are starting to see the potential of implementing Pinterest rich pins and your creative juices are flowing with ideas how you can use them in your business!
How to add rich pin data to your website or blog
I’m going to cover 2 types of pin in this post – place and article rich pins.
Place pins will be useful if you are a local business with a physical location people can visit – a shop, bar, workshop, hotel etc etc. Article pins are great for businesses that blog regularly – whether they have physical location people can visit or not. The type of pin you choose will depend on your marketing strategy and ultimately how you want your pins to work for you, so do put some thought into it!
1. Place Pins
Pinterest recognises both schema.org and open graph mark-up. That’s code that sits behind your website and provides additional information to search, social and other networks that recognise the data. Local SEO’s are usually familiar with schema.org because that is the mark-up recognised by Google, Bing and Yahoo. If you have worked with a Local SEO, you may find that much of the information is already present.
I’m going to stick with schema because that is what I know. Now I do wish there was an easy way to do this that required not touching a line of code – if there is I haven’t found it yet!
The “problem”, if you can call it that, is Pinterest requires the geo mark-up and that is not provided as standard on schema plugins for WordPress. Additionally, many plugins work fabulously within pages and posts, but don’t add meta data or allow you to add the info to a widget. If anyone finds one that works everywhere – do let me know!
What I do when I create WordPress local business sites is add the schema.org manually to a text widget or to the footer depending on the website.
Don’t glaze over just yet! Keep reading, I’ll give you a copy and paste of the basic code so you can add the data to your site footer or a widget area if you use WordPress.
Pinterest requires the following information on all pages as a minimum to enable Place rich pins:
- Place Name
- Geo Coords
They also suggest you include you use the Open Graph tag og:site_name as Schema.org does not support site names just place names.
Pinterest also supports:
- description
- address
- telephone
- aggregate ratings
- image
- telephone
- open hours
This schema.org will often be present already on a local business website and you may need to include the geo details. You can find your longitude and latitude at latlong.net. Below is the minimum requirements for Pinterest, copy and paste – I recommend into a footer or sidebar area that is present on every page you have images to be pinned
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness"> <div itemprop="name">YOUR BUSINESS NAME</div>
<div itemprop="geo" itemscope><meta itemprop="latitude" content="YOUR LATITUDE" /><meta itemprop="longitude" content="YOUR LONGITUDE" /></div>
So yes, it is rather complicated and you may need to ask your web developer to insert the code for you.
2. Article rich pins
If you use WordPress, there is no need to blow your mind for the article rich pin mark-up. Pinterest supports both Open Graph (used for Facebook) and Schema.org. I recommend Open Graph – it can be nice and simple using a plugin!
Pinterest requires the following information:
- og:type must be article or blog
- og:title
- og:description
The following tags are also supported:
- og:site_name
- og:url
- article:published_time
- article:modified_time
- article:author
- article:section
- article:tag
I recommend Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin, which will add all relevant Open Graph tags for you when you set up the social section. There are other plugins that will add Open Graph data too.
I found a good tutorial to set up rich pins on Blogger blogs. It looks a little complicated and does require a bit of code juggling. Read it on Blogging It Forward
Approve Your Rich Pins
Once all your data is in place, you need to get approved by Pinterest. Log in to Pinterest and validate your rich pin markup at http://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/validator/. If everything looks good you can click apply to get them approved. Approval for this blog took around 1 week.
Over to you…
Will you be creating Pinterest rich pins for your website or blog? Let me know in the comments 🙂 Don’t forget to find me on Pinterest! Give me a nudge and I’ll follow you too
How to Create Pinterest Rich Pins to Power Up Your Pinterest Marketing by Jan Kearney
Grab your guide to local search and learn:
- What elements are important on your website
- How to set up your Google My Business Local Page
- How Google Plus can help you zoom past your competitors
- Two things you should not neglect if you want to rank in the local search pack
- How to power past your competitors and dominate your area
Simply add your name and best email address in the box below and I'll whizz your report and worksheet straight over to you.
Don't worry, I hate spam too (probably more than you!) I'll never trade, share, sell, exchange your email address or any other jiggery pokery.
Wow, sounds like this would be an advantage, but I don’t have a business Pinterest account. Not sure how my existing boards would do on a business account. 🙂
You’d know exactly how they would do Bonnie, because Pinterest business accounts come with analytics once you verify your website 😉 It’s really easy to convert over too.
I realize that analytics would be available, but how does this affect the relationships I’ve build through the personal account?
Wouldn’t people get upset if I changed over to a business account and started offering “business related” offerings?
Hi Bonnie, I’ve had a business account since they became available and nothing changes on the front end other than that nice green verified tick when you verify your website. You still have the same followers and interact the same way.
Obviously, I can’t say if that will change in the future! Like everything else online, the only thing you can be certain of is change 🙂
I wonder the same thing Bonnie. When they first offered business accounts, I thought about it, but didn’t make the switch as I felt people were already connecting with me at my existing account.
This is why I would be reluctant to change over to a business account, Debra.
I’ll wait to see what Jan says about it… before making a new decision. LOL 🙂
Hi Debra – nothing changes with how you interact with your followers. That is still down to you 🙂
Very cool. I had no idea they had business accounts. I’ll get mine converted over and give it a try. Thanks for the info!
Enjoy Misty! Thanks for popping in 🙂
Hi Jan,
It’s new to me, and I guess it will take some time to get to grips with the technical bits, but I love the opportunities it offers. Thank you for the explanations! Will apply for Rich pins for my blog now, and try to set it up. But first of all need to figure out why my Gravatar picture is not showing anymore… 🙂
Looking forward to reading the next post!
Galina
Your gravatar picture is linked to your email address. So be sure you’re using the same email you originally set up on the Gravatar account.
If you want to change the email associated with your Gravatar, remember to go back into the account and change that email address! 🙂
Hi Bonnie,
Thank you for this! I added some more email addresses which I am using in my comments, so hope it starts showing 🙂
Best wishes,
Galina
Hi Galina, I found it glitchy with more than 1 email address – was a while back now because I just created a new gravatar with my other email address. That’s why you’ll still see my little bookworm occassionally when I use my gmail! Hopefully that’s ironed out now Gravatar is directly linked with WordPress and yours start showing if you added your email address.
Thanks. I never heard of “rich pins” – always good to learn something new. But I’ve always wondered about switching to a business account when most people seem to connect w/me personally.
🙂
Hi Debra, ahh, this is what I get for scrolling down comments rather than answering through the dashboard! Just answered this a little further up 🙂
How you interact with people on Pinterest won’t change with a business account unless you choose to do things differently. In fact people won’t notice anything different – you get a nice website verified tick on yor profile and analytics.
Thanks for popping in 🙂
I always forget about Pinterest and it is a part of my project that I have to work and work, good information, thanks.
Hi Shasheta, glad the info is useful for you! Thanks for popping in 🙂
What an information packed blog. I believe it was your last one that turned me on to changing my much neglected personal Pinterest account into a business one. Alas, I have not gotten there yet,
As usual, your posts are great!
Hi Rochelle, thanks for the kind words 🙂 Now get pinning! lol
These make so much more sense to me. Pinterest is still on my To Do list, but a business account makes so much more sense!
Hi Tamsin – well you know what they say, if you don’t measure it – you can’t manage it! Business accounts give you the analytics to start measuring. Rich pins make you stand out more, although that will change as more and more people use them.
Thanks for popping in 🙂
Wow, that’s a lot of good information. I am still pretty new to actually using pinterest for my blog so some of the stuff was a little over my head. I didn’t even know about rich-pins but I’ll definitely look it not it. Thanks!
Hi Salma – I’ll be doing another posts soon with how to quickly add article rich pins to WordPress blogs.
Thanks for popping in 🙂
I signed up and was accepted, but I didn’t realize I was limited to one type of rich pin. I wonder if that can be changed?
Hi Jenn – I was wondering the same thing. So far there’s no clear answer. You could try applying again for a different type and seeing if it goes through?
Thanks for popping in 🙂
This is great, I hadn’t realised what needs to be done to enable rich pins before. And nice to see you’ve pinned one of my blogs too 🙂