Just a few weeks ago we discussed social ecommerce, a strategy that uses peer-to-peer digital communications to drive sales. We covered Pinterest in terms of its value as social media, but in these short weeks, Pinterest has introduced a new feature that is bringing it one step closer to competing in the user-curated shopping arena: product pins. Let’s review what these pins entail and how they will affect your business.

Rich Pins

On May 20th, Pinterest made an exciting announcement on their blog: the site will now be providing pins with more information. Along with Product Pins, users will now begin to see Recipe Pins and Movie Pins in their feeds. The goal of these pins is to supply users with rich content on the pins themselves in order to help them decide whether or not they want to dig deeper and click through to the website.

The Anatomy of a Product Pin

The information product pins allow for bring the platform one step closer to user curated shopping. Below are the items covered in product pins:

• Pricing
• Availability
• Where to buy

How Can You Create Product Pins?

Pinterest offers two ways to take advantage of Product Pins. Both are code heavy and require the use of a third party platform.

• oEmbed

  Pinterest touts this as the preferred, flexible method for creating Product Pins.

• Semantic Markup

  If you already support Schema.org or Open Graph, this method may be easier for you.

Other Rich Pins

As mentioned above, there are two other types of rich pins in addition to Product pins, Recipe pins and Movie pins. Though these tools may not have applications for as many businesses as Product pins, they do lend themselves well to specific industries, allowing businesses that would previously not been able to use this social platform to take full advantage of it. For instance, restaurants may now pin full recipes in addition to images of their dishes for special promotions and entertainment bloggers and independent theaters may pin movies with their reviews.

Making the Most of Your Pins

Pinterest’s introduction of Rich Pins is a perfect example of the fact that though the web is opening up new opportunities for small businesses, it’s getting harder, not easier to take advantage of them. If you don’t have a full time web developer on staff, and let’s face it, that is a costly expense for small businesses to maintain, it is difficult to capitalize on these new Pinterest tools. Unless, of course, you work with a full service digital marketing and web development firm!

When you partner with a full service agency like Technology Therapy, you benefit from the expertise of our well rounded team of professionals. Our marketing coordinators work with our programmers and developers to ensure that your business is not only pinning excellent content on a regular basis, but also that all of the relevant information for your rich pins is provided. This strategy allows you to make the most of new technology and social media trends and your budget!

Rich Pins show great potential, but the key to making the most of them is having the support of a full service digital marketing agency. If you’d like to add Rich Pins to your business’s Pinterest boards, contact us for a free consultation. We will help you develop a superb Pinterest strategy and ensure that your website supports the technology for rich pins.