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"Pinterest is showing it means business.\nThe social bookmarking service announced Tuesday that its new analytics tool is now available to businesses worldwide. With the tool, businesses can see detailed data on the number of users who engage with their pins as well as information on what countries those users are from, what their interests are on the social network and off network data for those who have Pin It buttons installed on their websites.\nSee also: 30 Gorgeous Travel Locations: Most-Pinned Places on Earth\n\"We\u2019re pretty excited about this because it's actually our first global business tool launch that we\u2019re doing,\" Jason Costa, product manager at Pinterest, told Mashable in an interview this week. \"We talk here at Pinterest a lot about the importance of the user experience and how the Pinner side of the ecosystem is important to us. Businesses are equally and critically important to us as well.\" \nThe analytics tool was in the works for several months in a limited beta test with fewer than 100 partners. Now, anyone can technically take advantage of the new analytics tools as long as you sign up for a free business account on Pinterest. That said, the target audience here is small and medium-sized businesses.  \n\"At a high level, we are super interested in content creators of any types and also SMBs getting value out of this,\" Costa says. \"At the end of the day, what we are hoping is that these guys will be able to derive insights from the tool, inform their marketing strategies and ultimately help pinners have a better experience by optimizing the type of content.\"\n\nPinterest previously introduced a more rudimentary analytics platform, which the company expects to phase out over the next month. \nThe new analytics tool comes at a time when companies like Instagram and Twitter are rolling out deeper analytics platforms with an eye towards attracting more businesses and advertising dollars. Costa suggests advertising is not the primary incentive \u2014 at least not yet.\n\"This isn\u2019t so much an advertising tool. It's a free tool that is really meant to inform these guys how their organic strategy is working on the service,\" Costa says. \"By and large, we are putting this out there to make sure these businesses are getting the insights that they need to make sure their marketing and product strategies are improving over time.\"\nPinterest introduced its first ad product, promoted pins, late last year and expanded on that initiative more recently with the introduction of self-service ads. \nPinterest is now valued at $5 billion and is viewed by some analysts as the next big social network that will go public \u2014 once it revs up its monetization engine."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/08/26/pinterest-analytics-business/>