Social media analytics firm Pinfluencer is celebrating its first birthday, taking the opportunity to launch a new tool that will allow brands to measure consumer sentiment more effectively.

The startup unveiled an image recognition engine for Pinterest  that makes it possible to identify which pictures draw the most attention from viewers. The service quantifies the amount of traffic an image drives to a target site and breaks it down based on URL data and SEO tags.

“We see every pin on Pinterest as a distribution opportunity for our customer brands and we have spent the last year helping these brands see how to identify their top and most influential pinners and learn which pins actually drive the most sales,“ said Sharad Verma, the CEO of Pinfluencer. We are unveiling our new image technology to allow brands to understand which images on a webpage drives the most traffic relative to other images. These insights are extremely powerful.”

Pinfluencer claims that its service is leveraged by over 5000 “major” brands, including Sephora, Etsy, Z Gallerie and Orbitz.  The startup says that on average, clients have experienced follower acquisition growth rate increase by 156 and pins/day ratio jump by 125 percent.

Pinterest is fast becoming more than a social platform – it’s now an indisputable business tool.  Brands use the service to promote products, as well as gain insight as to what their consumers want.

On its own, Pinterest is just a photo-sharing site, but with third party analytics tools, it is a powerful platform to learn more about consumer sentiment, purchasing behavior, and perhaps the most important of all, buyer intent.  This is something Verma knows all too well, recognizing early on the untapped knowledge that lies behind Pinterest’s data.  We heard from Verma last year on the potential of Pinterest’s data-driven business, noting the higher level of engagement that can be boiled down to data points through his Pinfluencer platform.

Pinterest revolves around the highly engaging medium of photos, and because of this, analytics tools like Pinfluencer have adapted to its ecosystem to help brands get the information they need via image recognition technology.  Here’s two others to consider:

HOVR.IT

Pinterest users are plagued with the problem of finding where exactly they could buy an item they saw on the site.  A lot of people pin photos of shoes, clothes and accessories, but those pins don’t always come with retail links.  HOVR.IT solves this problem by providing its image recognition technology to Pinterest users.

Just need to install it’s browser extension on Google Chrome, visit Pinterest, and begin browsing the site.  If you see an item that interest you, just move your cursor above the item, click the HOVR.IT button and a side window will pop up to give you an idea as to where you can purchase the item.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work  on all pins, and it doesn’t always give a perfect match.

Curalate

Curalate combines sophisticated image recognition algorithms with scalable big-data technology, providing analysis of your images at a pixel level.  The idea is to reveal true metrics for products, not just the pages.  Curalate monitors brand presence, identifies brand advocates, identifies and spots trends, sees how a brand’s efforts stack up to the competition, and detects tweets and Facebook Likes originating from Pinterest to determine which content is driving traffic.

Written by Mellisa Tolentino and Maria Deutscher