For those of you out there patiently watching the rise of Pinterest and waiting for your chance to jump in and capitalize on the wildly popular social media site, the wait is over.  This week Pinterest launched business accounts and tools, making it the most recent addition to the comprehensive list of business-friendly social media sites.  Pinterest has been huge among young adult and middle-aged women, and what’s more is that Pinterest users are far more likely to buy online than are users from other social media sites.

So what does all this mean to the Social Media Marketer?  For you inbound marketers out there, it means a pool teaming with qualified leads.  It’s no big surprise that on a social media site focused almost entirely on visuals, users are more likely to make purchases.

“We hope to add more tools and features that are geared toward this audience” said Product Manager Cat Lee (a former employee of Facebook) of the thousands of businesses already on the platform. This is good news for businesses that are looking to see the impact of their social media activities.  Whether the tools will be as robust as Facebook analytics remains to be seen, but businesses are certainly excited about the opportunity to migrate to business accounts.

The move to embrace businesses may be an indication that Pinterest is also looking for a way to increase cash flow.  Social media networks always struggle to monetize their offering to the public, usually through sponsoring PPC adds.  However Lee was careful to say that the move had “nothing to do with monetization or [Pinterest’s] business model”.  If you ask us, that’s a little hard to take seriously.  Everything a business does is weighed against its effect on the balance sheet, and it’s unlikely that this move was designed without Pinterest’s financial future – and where the company will generate its income – in mind.