Pinterest used to be just another photo-sharing, social networking site, but entreprenuers soon realized it’s potential as a great business tool.  Yet Pinterest still lacked some features to make it the ultimate marketing platform, as we’ve discussed on several occasions here at SiliconAngle.

As with most startups that garner hoards of users but take their sweet time developing a business model, Pinterest’s attracting a unique ecosystem all its own.  As businesses seek Pinterest as an engagement tool for consumer interaction, analytics is becoming an increasingly important metric for brands.  Pinfluencer, the big-data analytics and discovery marketing engine designed especially for Pinterest, came out of private beta today.  Now, brands get more idea as to how their products are being perceived by consumers, and can determine if their ads are working in their favor, looking beyond the basic metrics of pins or repins.

“Consumers are Googling less and stumbling onto products in their social feeds more — that changes the game for retailers who now need to have a strong and continued presence in the feeds of curated social networks, such as Pinterest,” Sharad Verma, CEO of Pinfluencer, said. “We are seeing a shift from search to serendipity. Pins are the new hyperlinks and every pin is a distribution opportunity. To capitalize on this emerging opportunity, we created a beautifully visual CRM that helps companies intelligently identify and build relationships with brand advocates to unleash the power of pins.”

Early adopters of Pinfluencer include 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, GNC, HauteLook, Piperlime (a division of Gap Inc.), Rent the Runway, Minted, Beau-coup, Shop It To Me; and wikiHow.

That’s not all: Pinfluencer also closed a  $1.4 million round of funding led by Freestyle Capital and Baseline Ventures with the participation of angel investors Jesse Engle, former CEO and co-founder of CoTweet, and Mark Ghermezian who’s the owner of Mall of America.  The new round of funding will be used to expand the engineering, sales and marketing teams as well as develop additional platform enhancements and campaign capabilities.

“Pinfluencer fills a huge void in the market by giving retailers the ability — for the first time — to quantify brand engagement on Pinterest,” said David Samuel, co-founder of Freestyle Capital. “We invested in this rock star team from Yahoo, Bing and Yodlee as it has two of the most important qualities we look for in a startup — the vision to identify and understand an untapped opportunity; and the technological talent and know-how to deliver on that vision with a powerful and flawless implementation.”

Pinfluencer may have launched with plenty of pomp and circumstance, but it’s joining a growing crowd of Pinterest-specific analytics tools.  Here’s a few others to check out:

Pintics

Pintics is a Pinterest analytics tool that supports multiple users to highlight the best-performing pins by the traffic generated, sales generated or how often items are being repinned.  Aside from the multi-user feature, Pintics also offers pin uploading and tagging, which comes in handy for people in the marketing business who are handling multiple ad campaigns.  The downside of Pintics is that, like Pinterest, they have an invite-only policy.

Curalate

An analytics platform that uses image-recognition technology to curate “pins” for actionable data for brands.  Curalate  makes it easy for brands to measure, monitor, and grow their social curation presence, since more people are interested in seeing photos of things and not reading lengthy item descriptions.  The company recently signed a licensing deal with Group M Next, a group dedicated to sourcing new technologies.

PinReach

A company that builds tools to help businesses analyze their influence and data.   PinReach calculates a user’s influence by using several Pinterest analytics to come up with an influence score out of 100 by using metrics such as number of pins, followers and boards.