Are you using Pinterest effectively to drive more engagement to your blog? Pinterest is a great but underestimated marketing tool that indiv...

Are you using Pinterest effectively to drive more engagement to your blog? Pinterest is a great but underestimated marketing tool that individuals and businesses can use to drive more people to their site, or let them know more about what they do. Pins can help people discover the content that they like. As it stands, you can't be using Pinterest effectively unless you know what rich pins are, and how to use them. They provide a better way to show pinners information on your site.
What are Rich Pins?
Rich Pins are a way to give people useful information about the Pin they're looking at. This can be the price of a new laptop, vital ingredients for a recipe, and headlines for news releases. Supplemented with pinned images, these extra details help pinners decide whether they should make a recipe or not, or whether they can afford the latest iPhone.
Rich Pins ultimately might make the difference between a click and a glance.
How To use Rich Pins?
If you have a place, or feature products, recipes, movies or articles on your site, then you can use Rich Pins. You have to mark these objects on your website, so that Pinterest can identify your content and show the relevant information to pinners.
The marking can be done via various methods, including schema.org markup, Open Graph meta tags, etc. Since schema.org tags are the most popular and are supported by Google and other search engines, we'll be focusing on it.
Products
Following is an example HTML body markup for a products page.
<meta property="og:site_name" content="XYZ Store" />
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<meta itemprop="name" content="Product Name" />
<meta itemprop="url" content="http://shop.xyz.org/do/product/123" />
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://shop.xyz.org/images/1.jpg" />
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://shop.xyz.org/images/2.jpg" />
<span itemprop="description">Sample description.</span>
<div itemprop="color" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ProductColor">
<span itemprop="name">Aqua</span>
<meta itemprop="map" content="blue" />
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://cdn.example.com/a.jpg" />
</div>
<div itemprop="color" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ProductColor">
<span itemprop="name">Rose</span>
<meta itemprop="map" content="red" />
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://cdn.example.com/B.jpg" />
</div>
<a itemprop="relatedItem" href="http://shop.xyz.org/do/product/4"></a>
<a itemprop="relatedItem" href="http://shop.xyz.org/do/product/2"></a>
<a itemprop="relatedItem" href="http://shop.xyz.org/do/product/3"></a>
<div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
<span itemprop="price">$15.00</span>
<meta itemprop="priceCurrency" content="USD" />
<meta itemprop="availability" itemtype="http://schema.org/ItemAvailability"
content="http://schema.org/InStock" />
</div>
</div>
You have the following fields available for Products
- url
- name
- description
- brand
- productid
- image
- relatedItem
- referencedItem
- productExpiration
- gender
- color
- aggregateRating
Similarly, you have the following fields for offers.
- name
- description
- sku
- price
- priceCurrency
- standardPrice
- availability
- availabilityStarts
- availabilityEnds
- eligibleRegion
As in the sample HTML shown, you can modify and of the fields, or add more according to your needs. You can find the complete documentation here.
Once you have marked up your content, it's time to validate it. To do this, simple follow this validation page, and enter the URL you want to validate. The rest is simple.
Have you marked up any pages recently and used Rich Pins? Let us know about your experience in the comments section below! Cheers :)
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