Pinterest is now opening its platform to third-party marketers

Pinterest has decided that providing its own analytics for businesses via Pinterest Analytics probably isn’t robust enough — so it’s now letting them use third-party marketing technology software to analyze their Pinterest activity. The company announced that it is working with a select group of marketing technology developers including Salesforce, Piqora, Hootsuite, and Tailwind to grant automated access to some public data through an API known as “Business Insights”.

Following in the footsteps of social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, Pinterest will now allow marketers to ingest data from its service to help them better understand and interpret users’ activity on the site. The company will give a handful of third-party marketing technology providers access to information on how its users behave and interact with content across its service. At launch, the technology providers include Salesforce, Hootsuite, Spredfast, Percolate, Piqora, Curalate, and Tailwind. Pinterest hopes access to this data will help marketers figure out which of their activities on its service generate the most engagement, and which actions they may prompt users to take “downstream.” “Many businesses use Pinterest to learn about their customers. You might want to learn which of your products are popular, what types of images work best or which Pins are driving the most engagement and sales,” the company said in a statement.