A Complete Guide to Using Pinterest Rich Pins for Your Business
The power of Pinterest has experienced phenomenal growth over the past few years where this visual social media powerhouse has been accredited with driving the highest proportion of targeted traffic and sales, especially for vendors. Retailers beware! Pinterest has recently emerged a commercial winner out of its ‘recipes and bridal showers’ cocoon and demonstrated a whopping potential in augmenting the conversion rates for retail companies.
In recent years, Pinterest has been on a business-friendly spree and introduced several commercial features for its business account holders, the latest addition to which is ‘Pinterest Rich Pins’. Although Pinterest’s Rich Pins feature is only restricted to its business account holders, you can easily convert your personal Pinterest profile into a brand page by going to the Menu, clicking on the ‘Businesses’ option and then selecting ‘Convert Here’. The next window will ask you to fill out all the business-related information, accept the terms and require a verification of your account if you haven’t done it previously. That’s it; you can now start pinning your way to commercial success!
Once you get hold of a business account on Pinterest, you shouldn’t really have a reason to ignore Rich Pins. Read on to find out all about this amazing feature that can actually make a difference to your business.
Presenting Rich Pins!
You may know them as ‘Super Pins’, ‘Rich Pins’, ‘Enhanced Pins’, or not know them at all; but what sets Pinterest’s Rich Pins apart from regular pins is the extra information and direct links they display to viewers. From pricing details to locations and availability; and from product description to direct links to the product page; the extra information in enhanced pins makes them particularly more powerful for small businesses than regular pins, as they are more relevant and useful to pinners looking for a similar product.
Types of Rich Pins
Pinterest currently allows its commercial users to implement five types of rich pins, listed as follows:
Place Pins
Perfect for tourism and travel brands, Place Pins allow pinners to see the pins by location, by integrating information on places, addresses and phone numbers into an interactive map board. This type of rich pins is idyllic for businesses like restaurants and event planners that operate multiple branches and franchises, or even travel enthusiasts who can use them to highlight the best bars, romantic locations and adventure points.
Pinterest has partnered up with location discovery services like Foursquare, Citysearch and Airbnb to enable the automatic inclusion of location information on Place Pins.
Product Pins
Product Pins are a must-have for any ecommerce brand page on Pinterest as they allow you to highlight their pricing, location and availability information without being too salesy. An added advantage of using these pins is the free price notifications that your followers receive to alert them of your latest price drop or limited offers.
Article Pins
Bloggers, writers and authors; Pinterest’s article pins are your chance to keep your readers enlightened with essential information about your posts. Article Pins allow you to display the title, author’s name, descriptions, as well as URL, in addition to a catchy image for your content. And the best part? Pinterest adds an automatic “Read more on…”call-to-action to your Article Pin!
Recipe Pins
Whether you are a culinary expert maintaining a recipe blog, or have just started a restaurant on the high street, Recipe Pins can be your secret ingredient to commercial success. These rich pins include a tantalizing picture of your culinary product, and display recipe details, cooking time, ratings, servings, as well as related recipes within the same domain. Take your regular food pins to a whole new level by describing it with relevant information underneath and enjoy the additional traffic you receive on your food blog or restaurant’s website!
Movie Pins
If your latest venture is in the entertainment industry, then you will surely love the functionality of Pinterest’s Movie Pins! Movie Pins contain images shared from popular social movie sites like Netflix, Flixster, and Rotten Tomatoes, and include additional information on film ratings, release dates, the cast and directors.
The Rich Pinning Benefits
Still weighing their effectiveness for your business? Read on!
1. Automatic Updates
Pinterest Rich Pins have been designed to offer a synchronized system of information update between your website’s product page and your rich pins on Pinterest, So, for example, if you decide to add a twist to your basic vanilla cake recipe and alter its ingredients, or Netflix changes its ratings for a movie; the information will be automatically updated on the pin, without any need of manual changes!
2. Additional information makes pins more relevant and useful
Textual content along with visuals enhance a user’s understanding of your product and leads to more informed decisions. A picture is worth a thousand words, but by adding just a few more words, and numbers to your pin; you can make it more convenient for your followers to know your product and potentially make a purchase.
3. Rich Pins = Free Price Alerts
Definitely one of the best Pinterest features, free price alerts certainly make the pinning journey of your brand page worthwhile. Pinterest sends out automated emails to users who pinned your Rich Pins, in event of a price drop by more than 10% on the pinned products.
4. Traffic Boost
If yours is an e-commerce business, you can’t deny the importance of targeted traffic on your website and web storefronts! The retailing giant Target collaborated with Pinterest to run a trial on Rich Pins for their featured products, by pinning images with price and product availability information underneath. During the trial period, Target experienced a 70% increase in traffic on their website, generated from Pinterest.
5. Increase in Sales
Last, but definitely not the least, the free price alerts, additional information and increased traffic, have an overriding potential of translating into successful sales. After all, you can’t really imagine that having your product pinned by a hundred followers, and dropping the price by more than 10% to have free alerts flood your potential customer’s inbox; will result in a drop in sales!
Don’t forget to Pin and Share!
