Rich Pins: Why Pins Need to Live Their Best LifeMatthew Knell

VP of Social Media and Platform Partnerships, About.com

What is About.com?• Founded in 1996.

• 85 million people visit about.com every month.

• 1,000 sites featuring Experts on topics from parenting to technology, healthcare and cooking.

• Psst.. we’re hiring! (http://jobs.about.com)

3

It’s time to think of Pinterest as the

web’s best visual search engine

4

Pinterest SERP Pages!

5

What if this was your pin?

6

7

Would you share this?

8

Not a helpful comment

A maybe helpful board name

Each pin is an opportunity to sell your content to the user

Wow, what is this?

9

• Many comments on Pins are not helpful for establishing context

• There is no way to control any other metadata around the content

• There is little opportunity for media companies to inspire trust in their content

• So what to do as a media site?

Regular Pins are subject to the whims of regular people

10

• Pinterest introduced Rich Pins in 2013 to help make pins more useful

• Six kinds of Rich Pins exist:• Product• Place• Article• Movie• Recipe• App

• Many brands focus on Product pins, but for media, the rest of the options are an opportunity to own your Pinterest display.

Rich Pins!

11

Before and after

Now I know what site is this from, that this is an article and I can learn more

A site-provided meta description gives me more content.

A site-provided title that gives me more context!

A site-provided waypoint allows me to show where this is in the world

Why a Rich Pin is Better

13

Recipe pins add ingredients

Article pins add descriptions

What happened?

14

Grew 70%

year over year

108% more

engaging than other

social

Up 35% in a

single week

About.com Pinterest Traffic After Rich Pins Implementation

16

• Learn about Rich Pins markup and validate your site • Bonus: Most Rich Pin tags use Open Graph tags, so if you’ve built

those in for Facebook, they will work for Pinterest too!

• Add an additional social-friendly title field and write a “clicky” title

• Write good meta descriptions of 200-300 characters with keywords people are likely to search on Pinterest

• In your articles, add Pinterest friendly photos and resize them big, and vertical

How you can help Pins live their best life

17

Getting thousands of things right

once

Getting one thing right

thousands of times

=

Closing affirmation

Thank you! @matthewknell for questions, hi-fives and heckles

18