You could be a cooking website that finds obvious benefits from Pinterest with steady pins and increased traffic, or you may be a company that specializes in merchant services for small business professionals who’s still trying to figure Pinterest out. Either way, one thing’s for sure: you know Pinterest is popular.

Today, everybody’s on Pinterest, from Martha Stewart to Ryan Seacrest. The bookmarking network has over 10 million registered users, 11.7 million unique visitors each month (as of February) and has already outshined Facebook as a major traffic referral source for big brands like Real Simple.

And with Pinterest activity ever on the rise, the questions on most business marketers’ minds are the same: How can we use this social network better? How can we bring in more traffic? What will increase our pins?

To help answer those questions, here are three resources to use today to skyrocket your pins!

Pinerly: Analytics & a Future Way to Schedule Pins

If the first step towards increasing your pins is understanding how they work, Pinerly is one of the most powerful resources you could look to. Currently in Beta, Pinerly promises to be a comprehensive Pinterest analytics dashboard. After being accepted into the service, you can pin images through Pinerly (in the same user-friendly style of dashboard that Pinterest offers) and then use it to measure clickthroughs, likes and repins in what it calls campaigns, with stats viewed by day, month or certain time frames. In the future, Pinerly plans to launch tools for scheduling pins—a tool that has great potential for benefiting businesses—as well as a Pinerly bookmarklet and a way to manage multiple accounts.

Repinly: A Look inside Pinterest Patterns

Along the same lines of research, Repinly is a valuable site that provides analytics about Pinterest as a whole, revealing info about Pinterest users and content. You can see what the most popular pinning categories are, how users are spending their time on Pinterest and who the most followed users are. This can provide valuable insight on best practices for using Pinterest, as far as what works and what doesn’t.

Percolate: Curated Content to Keep Users Pinning

Built on the idea that you have to be a content consumer to be a content creator, Percolate is designed to improve the content you are pinning, thus keeping your followers engaged and listening to the pins you post from your own site. Percolate maps your company’s interests, whether you’re a safety business that makes Kevlar heat resistant gloves or a gardening store marketing outdoor plants, pulling related content worthy of your audience. Then it helps you regularly post pins, as well as promote them on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Other helpful tools include Pinpuff (think Klout for Pinterest), Pinreach (more insight and analytics) and Woobox (an easily installed Pinterest tab for your Facebook page).

What do you think? How could these resources help you? Are there other tools you’ve found helpful for increasing pins?

Shanna Mallon is a writer for Straight North, a leader among Chicago Web design agencies. Check out the Straight North Blog or follow @StraightNorth on Twitter.

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