Pinterest Introduces New Article Pinning Feature

Pinterest is already being used as a great tool to discover and collect articles in the form of an online scrapbook, with more than 5 million articles being pinned every day. Pinterest has recently decided to expand on this use, creating a new look for article pins, which allows them to have more information – including the headline, author, story description and link all on the pin. This allows articles to be pinned, saved and organised more efficiently.

Image - Pinterest blog

This follows a similar move which Pinterest introduced back in May with its ‘Rich pins’. This development allowed pins to feature a greater amount of detail on them, particularly useful for pins that feature recipes, films or products purchasable online as they could enrich the pins with updated details like ingredients, movie reviews or the availability of goods and prices. This was a valuable move making Pinterest more useful for business and not just for personal use. The article pinning feature will also help aid Pinterest for business because it provides "a great way for writers and publications to reach new and existing audiences" according to Sarah Bush, the newly appointed UK country manager for Pinterest. These latest developments therefore seem to suggest that Pinterest is trying to make its platform more useful to business users as well as to those who use the site for personal reasons.

The new feature for pinning articles better will help to make the pinned articles look more relevant at a first glance. Pinterest users will now be able to see the headline, author, story description and link when they come across an article that has been pinned on the site. The Pinterest blog has also commented that this feature will soon be rolling out to mobile phone users as well as those on computers. In addition to showing similarities to the new ‘Rich pins’ which Pinterest introduced, it is also shows a likeness to Twitter’s introduction of “expanded Tweets” which they introduced last year. This offers a similar feature, showing an article preview with a headline, image thumbnail and article introduction.

The new feature also helps people to take a ‘pin now, read later’ approach, as they can save articles which they have come across online and choose to read them at a later date when it is more convenient to them. This allows users to create their own reading room on Pinterest by adding the Pin It button to their own browser so that they can start creating a collection of articles that they want to read. The Pinterest reading room also helps you to find interesting new content to read as there are a number of high-profile names who are already using the feature. For instance, Arianna Huffington who has an article board to give an insight into what she is reading at the moment.

This new feature can be particularly useful for publishers who are trying to reach a target audience composed mainly of women, as women are the most common user of the site, making up around 72% of the total users. Pinterest has already proved to be a major referral source of traffic and a study by Yieldbot, has found that Pinterest dominated referral traffic across leading publisher websites, representing 85.2% of referral traffic compared to just 8.3% for Facebook.

A number of sites have already signed up for the service including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mashable and the Guardian to name a few. For now, it looks like Pinterest Article pins will be a successful new addition to the site, adding a new dimension to the website which has until now been known mainly for its visual content.

What do you think?

Do you think that the addition of Pinterest article pins will benefit the site and increase its use?

Rowena Cormack  

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