Of course it was only a short matter of time before an analytics tool for Pinterest, the latest phenomenon in the social media world, would rise to the surface. PinReach is a service that measures the amount of a user's influence on Pinterest. This is done by gathering information about the total numbers of pins, repins, likes, liked-s, followers, following, comments, and boards.

In short, PinReach does much the same for Pinterest that Klout does for the variety of popular social networking websites out there. In fact, until recently PinReach had been known as PinClout, and was advertising itself as the "Klout for Pinterest." This, however, was forced to a stop when a cease-and-desist letter from Klout's attorneys arrived at PinClout/PinReach's headquarters at the end of February 2012. The letter, which was posted online inside an article at TechCrunch, stated that PinClout's name was "confusingly similar" to Klout's name, especially so due to similarities in the services and products that the two companies provide.

The founders of the startup PinClout decided it was best to rename their company, rather than deal with expensive and time-consuming litigation work. And so, earlier this week, they renamed their company and its product PinReach, which was announced on their official blog, as well as reported on by TechCrunch. It was a good move on their part to address this potential name issue while their company is still in its initial stages.

Name controversy aside, how valuable is this company and its product? In my post yesterday I discussed at length how valuable a tool Pinterest is for the SEO and social media marketing campaigns of businesses. I rested my case on the numbers: Pinterest has officially surpassed Twitter as the social media site that generates the greatest amount of referral traffic.

This means that Pinterest is incredibly important, and that businesses must start paying attention to it, and cultivating their own presences on it. In the same way that they utilize Klout to fine-tune their efforts on other social media sites, they can use PinReach to improve their marketing strategies on Pinterest. Using a proper analytics tool can provide great benefits in profitability in the long run.

So if your business has started up a Pinterest account recently, take the time to check PinReach, and consider how it can help your SEO campaign.