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How to Add Rich Pins for Articles to Your WordPress Blog

Rich Article Pins

Do you ever have this problem? You created a wonderful blog article. You then create this amazing pin, and you pin it. It’s going viral and soon your smiling your big smile, UNTIL, you see someone has stolen your thunder by posting their web address or user business name in the description of your pin, which is poor Pinterest etiquette.

Before, there was nothing you could do to control the credibility and online reputation of your blog posts, but the wonderful people at Pinterest wanted to keep online publishers like you and me happy. And so they invented rich pins.


What are Rich Pins?

Rich pins, are pins on Pinterest that offer additional information based on that data that Pinterest reads or “scrapes” from your website. The visual social network already offered to give this additional rich pin information for websites that contained recipes, movie information and for products.

This type of information may include, but not limited to, the type of ingredients, what year the movie came out, and the price of the product. All this rich is controlled by you or your webmaster that got to control this information.


Where does Rich Pin Information Come From?

This information comes from Pinterest “scraping” information from you website. They’re looking for languages known as Schema (friendly for search engines) or Open Graph (created by Facebook). Here’s a great infographic by Tailwind that details what exactly makes up this rich pin information for articles.

How to Make Rich Article Pins


How Does Rich Pins Apply to WordPress Blogs?

With rich pins available for articles, blogs, and online publishers, you now have a way to show your work is authentic. And on top of that it helps your pins stand out from the rest of the thousands of pins when people see them on the Pinterest feed, and help you gain more Pinterest followers.

Here’s a visual of what a rich pin for articles looks like in a Pinterest feed. This pin came from a blog article written by my client Yu Kai Chou, one of the world’s top gamification experts.

Gamification

Here’s another one that features Krishna De’s article that discusses 7 factors that can increase retweets on Twitter.

Krishna De Rich Pins

Notice how the letters are bold. If you don’t have rich pins for your blog pins, then those bold bright letters don’t show.

But here’s also the beautiful part. If a person clicks on a pin, the meta description for that blog article shows up! Wow..and marketers only said that meta descriptions were good for click through rates on search engines like Google, psshh, now they’ll help your click through rate on Pinterest as well.
(Come on you’ve got be excited about that!)

And a nice little touch done by Pinterest, is the automatic call to action! Look at the picture just below. Isn’t it just beautiful? If that doesn’t give you a little bit of a Pingasm then you’re definitely not on the right social network.

Pinterest Meta Description


How do I Actually Add Rich Pins to My WordPress Blog?

Okay now that you know how beneficial it is to add rich pins to your WordPress blog, I want to show you the how to’s. If you run a WordPress blog then download YOAST SEO plugin. (If you want to find more option, you can easily other similar SEO Plugins for WordPress.)

Once you’ve downloaded it, make sure you activate the plugin.

When it’s active you will see on the left hand side a wrench with the words SEO on it, near the bottom. Click on it, and choose the social tab that pops up.

What will happen next is that you will be diverted to the following screen. Click on the box that’s on the top right next to “add OpenGraph Meta data.” And voila, your page should have OpenGraph meta data!

Yoast


Test out Your Rich Pins for Articles

Once it’s done, the next step that you want to do is to see if Pinterest recognizes the website. Take your most recent blog post and submit it to the rich pin validator.

The site will look like this. I decided to put in my Pinterest pal, Ivo Madeleno’s, the Pinstagram guy’s article on “How to Pin from Facebook with Just One Click.” After I did I pushed the big Validate button.

Rich Pins

And once that’s gone through and if everything is working out fantastic then you should get something that looks like the picture below. Don’t worry if you don’t have a photo show up. For some the picture will show, but for others it won’t.

Rich Pin Validation

Now all you have to do is wait. I’ve heard different times from different people. Melissa Megginson of Tailwind said it took her a few weeks to get approval, for myself it took about one and half weeks.

Now that you’re armed with the knowledge of how to add article rich pins to your WordPress blog, go out and do it. The one thing I’ve learned about Pinterest is to take advantage of their new technology. The earlier you do it, the more you will stand out before almost 50% of pins become rich pin validated and at that point you lose your competitive edge.

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Written by Vincent NG

I’m a social media marketer, particularly for Pinterest, It all started back in 2010 when Pinterest was in beta. It was the fastest independent website to get 10 million unique visitors in the U.S. This really struck a chord with me, and it was then that I knew that Pinterest was going to be a powerhouse in the world of digital and social media marketing.