If you’ve spent any time on Pinterest, you’ve likely noticed more than one pin with the same image and content. Sometimes these ‘sister pins’ show a different description or link to a round-up post with the original link in it. While this isn’t always a bad thing for users and contributors alike, it does present a problem in giving credit to the original content.
Crowded Landscape
With 100 million active users, the platform is crowded with people sharing, repining and contributing content. It can get tricky to track down the original post or person responsible for the content. I’m sure you, like me, have been duped by seemingly relevant, interesting content. These imposter pins take you to a different page with a totally different topic. Pinterest is looking to change this through a series of actions including the launch of their summary feature.
Let’s use an example. Say I have a huge Pinterest following and I decide to pin content from your site. The pin blows up and people repin from mine. Yes, it’s great for the pin to gain exposure. But what about the love for the pin you posted in the first place with the image, content and URL? The new pin doesn’t really tell the entire story. My pin gained some serious momentum and this should count in telling the real story for you too. The new Pinterest summary pin will help by showing users where content originally came from, and how popular it really is.
What is the Pinterest summary pin
The Pinterest summary pin collects all of the pins and repins from ‘sister pins’ (pins that are not the original link, URL and image). These sister pins, no matter how much or how little attention they get from Pinterest users, combine to tell a full story of just how popular that content is. This change gives more incentive to users to post high-quality content. With more power going to the original post, it lets users find meaningful contributors more easily.
Why it’s necessary
Content on Pinterest doesn’t just come from Pinterest alone. Anything on the Internet is fair game. Want to post that cute cat meme? Copy and paste the URL pick the photo you want and bam; add it to the board of your choice. With all of this content floating around, it’s not uncommon to come across junk links or descriptions that don’t actually take you to the place you wanted to go in the first place.
When researching this topic for this blog, initially I thought that Pinterest had developed a solution for something that didn’t really seem like much a problem. But I was wrong. The more I learned about the summary pin, the more I realized how impactful this could be and how much it could change the user experience. Yes, Pinterest worked just fine without the summary pin. But, with the proper citation, each user gets a clear picture of how their content did across the platform as a whole, not just in their sphere of influence. This is especially important for businesses or people tracking the success of their content to plan more in the future. While there hasn’t been any official release of this feature, we have heard plenty of rumblings about a whole package of new features for Pinterest.
Add personal notes when repinning
What if you are repinning other people’s content? Do you get any credit? You can if you add a new description. This is good practice for any business using social media in general. If you want to be perceived as a subject matter expert when you curate content you need to add value. That value is your description, opinion or idea on why you are sharing this content. It is more work, but it also enhances your value as a resource on Pinterest.
Pinterst hopes the increase in unique content will help drown out the low quality pin descriptions (e.g. keyword stuffing or just emoticons). With the summary pin this new content will be included in the history of the pin, giving people a reason to comment and repin the content of others raising the overall quality of content discussion on Pinterest.
As you review the data in the Pinterest summary pins look at who shares your pin and what users say about your pins. Use the information about what types of content people respond to as a starting point for your next pin.
Roundpeg is an Indianapolis social media firm