Pinterest announced some lovely new developments this week… rich pins and new support for pinning from mobile apps.

What will this mean for brands with business profiles and us pinners? Rich pins will make it easier to turn inspiration into action. There is a cool trend for pinners to create Completed Pins boards, a collection of pins that inspired the pinner to take action and actually make those cookie monster cookies! The results and notes about their experience are then shared on a Completed Pins board. The not-so-successful results can be found here: nailed it! So, how will rich pins inspire more action?

Instead of just being an image and description, certain kinds of pins now include specific information, making the pins far more informative and useful. The three types of rich pins currently rolling out with this capability are Products, Recipes and Movies.

Products

This is awesome for any brand with an online store. When people come across a rich pin pinned from your website (and you’ve set up your website correctly, which we’ll cover in a sec) they will be told the price, availability and where to buy that product, including a click through to purchase. Test it out by pinning from one of these online stores: AnthropologieAsoseBayEtsyModcloth

Recipes

Pinned recipes will automatically include cook time, ingredients and servings. Very useful if you are searching for quick recipes or something specific, like vegetarian dishes. You will still need to visit the website to see the full recipe. Pinterest is working with some key recipe sites like  101 CookbooksEpicuriousGood HousekeepingMartha Stewart Living and Real Simple.

Movies

Not as useful but still cool, movie pins include the release date, rating, Tomato score, director and featured cast members. Your leading websites are FlixsterNetflix and Rotten Tomatoes.

What does this mean for brands?

The benefit of rich pins for brands is the ability to give potential customers more product information and an easy click through to purchase online. To set up this capability on your website (and ensure this extra information pulls through when your products are pinned) there are some meta tags that you need to apply to your site. For the geek info on how to do this click here. Once that’s done apply for validation from Pinterest here. Once accepted, Pinterest will automatically scan and pull the relevant data from your website. Get in touch with your website people today and give them this link!

Mobile App Pinning

Before now Pinterest has only allowed pinning from mobile websites. However, there are now options that allow businesses to add pinning to their mobile apps. Pinterest are working with some companies to test this and the early initiators are BehanceBrit+CoEtsyFotopediaJetsetterModclothSnapguideTEDThe North Face and Zulily.

This is a great development for brands with an online retail presence and have a mobi app that features products people want to share to Pinterest.