product management

Pinterest’s Rich Article Pin vs Regular Pin

Rich Pin vs Regular Pin

I’ve been a Pinterest fan since the early days and have long seen the universal appeal beyond the stereotypical Recipe & DIY pinning activity. Despite the continued perception that this is still the main use case, Pinterest’s data has been showing otherwise and they have been launching features to support the other use cases (more info can be found in my recap of the Pinterest for Publishers event they held in March).

One of these features is Rich Pins which are pin formats structured to give more data for Products, Recipes, Movies, Articles, & Places. They’re super easy to implement on your site – in fact, if you are already using Open Graph meta-tags all you have to do is Validate and Apply! More info can be found on Pinterest’s Rich Pins Developer Documentation (side note: I have found Pinterest’s Developer Documentation much more useful than certain other “social networks”).

In fact, if I had realized it was going to be this easy I would’ve done this much sooner for the News sites I manage. I applied last week and exactly 1 week later got my confirmation from Pinterest that our sites were approved and ready to go. The nice thing is that the change to Rich Pin format applies to all articles pinned from your site retroactively. Since I didn’t take a screen capture of what our pins looked like before, so I used another news site for the Rich Article Pin (left) vs Regular Pin (right) example above.
As you can see, the “Rich Pin” includes the site icon and name of the site below the image. It also has a special treatment for the Article Headline with an extra space for the user entered Description while regular pins just have the user entered Description.
Note that the image used by Pinterest is the apple-touch-icon asset (which the icon used when your site is bookmarked on an on Apple touch device. See my post on “Considerations for Website Home Screen Icons for Touch Devices” for more information). Not sure if you have one? Pinterest provides a handy dandy Rich Pin Validator where you can preview what your Rich Pins will look like.
Want to learn more about Rich Pins? Here are some good resources:
Have you implemented Rich Pins on your websites? If so, I’d love if you shared the results in a Comment!