Pinterest has today released hover buttons for all website owners to implement on their own sites. These are not the usual type of Pinterest button. These ones appear when your mouse hovers over an image, making it even easier for you to share content with your followers on Pinterest.
It is a simple process to add Pinterest Hover Buttons to your site, it just needs one line of Javascript that calls the Pinterest API. You also only need the one line of code no matter how many images are on the page so it is ideal if you have some form of gallery section on your site. The same is true of product pages, when a user hovers over the image of one of your products they will see a small “Pin It” button in the top left of the image. This feature will be useful for a lot of users. Not everybody on Pinterest pins content to display to others, many use it to curate their own collections of interesting snippets from the web and a Pinterest Hover Button will make it that little bit easier for users to curate your content.
Not all images on a page that has Pinterest Hover Buttons enabled will display the Pin It button when a mouse moves over them. Images that are less than 80×80 pixels will not show the hover button. The same is true of CSS background images. It will also be possible to stop a hover button displaying if you add the attribute data-pin-no-hover=”true” to an image tag.
It should also be noted that Hover Buttons will not work on mobile sites as they do not provide the user with the ability to hover over an image.
You might be wondering if something as apparently trivial as this is likely to make any sort of difference to the way users behave on the web. My thought is that it definitely will. I can think of dozens of examples where a new feature is introduced that seems nearly pointless but then starts to be used ubiquitously. In my own case when the Chrome browser allowed you to search in the address bar I thought “big deal” but now it is my preferred method of searching and most other browsers have introduced a similar feature.
It will, of course, provide a little heightened brand awareness for Pinterest. With most websites following some sort of template we can become immune to buttons that are tempting us to “Like us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter”. The hover button will provide something that will appear as the user moves their mouse around the screen and this is likely to catch the user’s eye and maybe encouraging a few new users to try Pinterest as their preferred form of social media.
I have implemented Pinterest Hover buttons on this site as can be seen from the images below. Do you think that you will be on yours?
