AND WHY THEY ARE IMPORTANT
Have you ever noticed that some pins on Pinterest look different from others? Think of when you click on a recipe pin. Sometimes the ingredients will conveniently be listed bellow the pin image even before you have to open up the website. This is a Pinterest rich pin. Or think of when you see this cute scarf from Etsy and the price is also visible right on the pin. Also a rich pin! These are only 2 of the 4 kinds of rich pins, but put simply, a rich pin allows you to display additional information about your content. Here’s all about them and how to enable rich pins on your account.
Pin this to come back to it later!
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Who can use rich pins?
If you’ve never heard of rich pins before this post, you might be a little confused right now… No worries! I’m here to explain it all in a simple way.
First things first, you’ll need a Pinterest Business account to use rich pins. Unless you run a blog or a business and use Pinterest as way to drive traffic to your website, rich pins won’t really be of an advantage for you. In other words, anyone can make a Pinterest Business account and anyone can then in turn create rich pins, but why go through that trouble if you aren’t trying to increase traffic or boost online sales? I’d instead spend that time making muffins or snuggling with the kitties…
What are the benefits of using rich pins?
We’ve established in the last section that the main goal of rich pins is to either increase traffic to you blog or website, boost sales or drive awareness to your brand. Now lets take a look at how rich pins help us do that.
Accurate Information
When someone re-pins your pin and it’s not a rich pin, they have the option of changing the pin description. This means that you have no control over the accuracy of the information shown bellow your pins when they are being repined. However, when you have a rich pin, the users can still add in their own notes or description, but your main pin description and header will always be shown first and can’t be edited by anyone but you. You can now be sure that when your pin gets bounced around on Pinterest, the information attached to it will always be accurate.
More Informative
As mentioned above, a rich pin will include a header and pin description. When you use rich pins to share your blog posts (or articles as Pinterest calls them), your content will appear much more appealing to potential Pinners. Your blog post title will show as a bold headline over your image [1], a mini bio (with Favicon) will be added bellow the pin [2] and there will also be a small post description displayed under the pin [3]. As opposed to the normal pin, this rich pin provides more useful information directly on the pin. (see the image bellow to view those benefits)
Rich pins will display different information for other types of pins (such as recipes and products), but for the sake of the above example I’m going to stick with the Article Pin (as it’s the most popular for bloggers like me and you).
Street Cred + Brand Recognition
With your mini bio and Favicon displayed bellow your pin, coupled with your specific pin styling, Pinners will start recognizing YOUR pins. If a Pinner has previously read some of your content and loved it, and then notices your bio underneath another pin, there’s a higher likelihood that they’ll re-pin this pin too because your pins are becoming a source of trusted content.
left: Normal Pin, right: Rich Pin
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What are the 4 kinds of rich pins?
When enabling rich pins for your website, you are first going to have to choose what kind of rich pin works best for your type of content. Here are the 4 different kinds of rich pins:
- Article Pin: Article pins, like in the example above, display a bold header above the image, a writer bio below the pin and a short blog/story description. Great for bloggers with informational content. (This is the kind I use!)
- Recipe Pin: A Recipe pin will pull the ingredients list, serving size and cook time from the post and display it bellow the pin in Pinterest. This is great for food bloggers.
- Product Pin: A Product pin will display the price of the product in real time (meaning it will be updated if the price ever changes) and a direct button to go and purchase the item. Great for Etsy shop owners.
- App Pin: Lastly, the App pin will display a download button so Pinners can download the pinned app directly from Pinterest. Note that this is only available for IOS as of today.
left to right: Article Pin, Recipe Pin, Product Pin, App Pin
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Prefer to WATCH the process??
I’ve got you! Pssstt… You’ll also get to see how I like my coffee… ;)
How do I enable rich pins on my WordPress website?
There are multiple ways you can enable rich pins on your website. The easiest one in my opinion is by using the Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin is also my favourite SEO plugin for WordPress, so… bonus! However, if you’re already using another SEO plugin or prefer not to add one, you can follow the Pinterest Developers instructions on their website.
1. Yoast SEO plugin
In your WordPress sidebar, navigate to Plugins > Add New. Search for the Yoast SEO plugin, and once you’ve found it, download and activate it on your website.
Now that the plugin is installed on your website, you will notice a new tab in your WordPress sidebar called SEO. Hover over this, and click on Social. A new page will open up with different social media tabs at the top. Click on the Facebook tab (weird, I know, you would think to click on the Pinterest tab, but nope, Facebook is the one we want here).
The first thing you should see under Facebook Settings is a box to Enable or Disable Add Open Graph meta data. You want this option enabled. Mine was already enabled when I checked!
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2. Rich Pins Validator
Next step is to visit the Rich Pins Validator, provided by Pinterest.
The box you just enabled in the Yoast plugin will allow the proper page metadata to be visible for Pinterest. You now have to tell Pinterest that you’ve enabled this metadata for them to allow your site to pin rich pins!
At the bottom of the Rich Pins Validator page, these is a box for you to enter a post URL. Choose any one of your blog posts (really doesn’t matter which one!) and paste the URL in there. Click validate.
That’s it. Easy peasy! They say it can take up to a week for your site to be validated, but when I did it, it took less than half a day. For others it took less than 10 minutes, so get ready to rock your new rich pins shortly. You’ll know when you get validated because you’ll receive an email from Pinterest.
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Did this work for you? Have any other questions? Any tips for me to add to this post? Let me know in the comments bellow. I love hearing from you.