Google+ is a great social media site in spite of its recent criticisms. You might be more inclined towards one of the other ones, but personally Google+ is everything I need and want. That said, one feature has been missing for some time and that was the ability to pin items. Pinning is not new to social media as you can do this on Twitter etc. However, it was not made available to users on Google+. For those that need clarification pinning it meant in the sense that you can effectively re-post an item on your page. You want to send back out a post you made earlier without having to constantly re-send, well with pinning you just hit pin and it stays at the top of your page. As mentioned, this was a feature largely missing from Google+.
That did change early on 2014 when community managers were able to pin posts to the top of their pages for repeat consumption. But this was not available to the average user, like you and me. However, it seems Google has recently been on a pinning crusade. When they released their new email client, Inbox by Gmail, pinning was an integral feature, allowing users to pin emails they want to keep hold of or remember. Not to mention with Android’s new operating system, Android 5.0 (Lollipop) you also now have the ability to pin apps to your homescreen so other people cannot navigate straight to your gallery to check out your nudie selfies.
Well, likewise the pinning feature has finally landed on Google+ for everyone. Now, if there is an article, story or post you want to keep fresh in your stream then you can pin that post. To do so is rather easy. Simply hit the drop down menu on any post you have shared (or re-shared) and you will see at the top of the list the ‘Pin Post’ reference (see image below). Once clicked, your post will remain. Obviously, once the post is spent and its time to get rid off it, then just re-hit the drop down menu and click ‘Unpin post’ and you are done. Pinned posts will be visible to everyone on both desktop and mobile although it is worth noting you can only currently pin from your desktop. It’s probably safe to say though Google will soon enough make mobile pinning possible too.
