Pinterest Adds More Info To Pins And “Pin It” Button To Certain Apps

Pinterest has partnered with a number of brands to add more information to certain pins. Product, movie and recipe pins pinned from certain sites will display more information about their subjects to save users having to search off-site for it. Also, certain apps now have a “Pin It” button to make pinning on mobile devices easier.

These new, more informative pins are called “rich pins”. Any brand can apply to make all their future pins into rich pins on the Pinterest for business site. However, Pinterest advises brands who want to add rich pins to “prep [their] website with meta tags” and “test out [their] rich pins” before applying “to get them on Pinterest.”

Product pins from retail partners display pricing, availability and location information. Recipe pins from chosen pinners display ingredients, cooking time and serving suggestions. Movie pins from Flixster, Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes contain ratings, reviews and a cast list.

Rich pins are identifiable in the stream thanks to the source logo at the bottom left of the pin and, in some cases, a preview of some of the extra information they contain. The logo must belong to one of Pinterest’s partners. Software Engineer Anna Majkowska lists all the partners in the announcement post on the Pinterest blog:

For clothes, furniture, gifts and products:
Anthropologie, Asos, BHLDN, eBay, Etsy, Free People, Home Depot, Modcloth, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Overstock, REI, Sephora, Shopify shops, Shop Terrain, Sony, Target,Urban Outfitters, Walmart, Wayfair, Zulily 

 
For mouth-watering recipes:
101 Cookbooks, Better Homes and Gardens, Bon Appetit, Chobani, Country Living, Delish,Epicurious, Good Housekeeping, Leite’s Culinaria, Martha Stewart Living, MyRecipes,Naturally Ella, Nestlé Very Best Baking, Real Simple, Simply Recipes, Skinny Taste, The Girl Who Ate Everything, The Kitchn,What’s Gaby Cooking, Whole Foods Market, Woman’s Day

All the information displayed in rich pins is updated automatically on Pinterest when updated on the parent site. “Right now,” says Pinterest, “there are three types of rich pins: movie, recipe and product”, suggesting that Pinterest intend to introduce new types of rich pins in the future. In the announcement post, in fact, Majkowska asks users to suggest which pin category should be improved next. 

To make pinning easier on mobile devices, certain apps now have a “Pin It” button alongside other share widgets. Users can pin directly from the following sites using the new Pin It button:

Behance, Brit+Co, Etsy, Fotopedia, Jetsetter, Modcloth, Snapguide, TED, The North Face, and Zulily The new “rich pins” feature is one of a number of updates that Pinterest has made in the last week, first adding notifications and mentions to the app and then allowing users to send pins on-site, as they continue to improve the site’s and app’s appearance and functionality.

What do you think of rich pins?     

Pinterest App Update Adds Notifications And Mentions

Pinterest has updated its mobile app services for Android and iOS devices. Pinterest for Android version 1.5 and Pinterest for iOS version 2.4 now include notifications, allow users to mention others and have improved search capabilities, with suggested results appearing as users type.

With the updates installed, users will receive notifications informing them when someone comments on their pin or mentions them. Pinterest has also introduced push notifications so that users can stay abreast of what’s happening while the Pinterest app is not open. If a user wishes to mention their friends on the go, they can. All a user needs to do to draw a friend’s or follower’s attention to a pin is include an ‘@’ symbol followed the person’s name in a comment.

Suggested searches will appear when users type into the search bar at the top off the app. Users will also be able to see previous searches they have made, even those on other devices. According to the announcement post on Pinterest’s blog, these searches can be deleted in the settings tab.

Pinterest has been relatively slow to adapt to the mobile trend when compared to Facebook and Twitter, both of which have fully embraced mobile. Facebook, for example, recently released Facebook Home: an Android mobile-specific user interface. Twitter’s SMS-like micro-messaging core principle, meanwhile, has always leant itself to mobile usage.

It could be argued that Pinterest will never be as user friendly on mobile devices as it is on desktop devices and laptops: certainly, due to its layout, it will never be as easily navigated on a phone as it is on a monitor. However, if users can stay abreast of notifications and quick-respond to messages on the go – as made possible by the new updates – they are far more likely to use the app frequently.

If the Pinterest app did have all the features that are available on Pinterest.com, quick browsing through three columns of content would be the only thing users would miss. However, if they set up their notifications correctly, they could receive all the content they require direct to their app notifications tab, without needing to search for it. Of course, on Pinterest, browsing and discovering something is half the fun.

What do you think of the new Pinterest app?