PopTip Launches Zipline Analytics On Instagram, Letting Brands Monitor Photo ...

PopTip, the Techstars-backed startup that offers real-time language tracking across social platforms, has today launched its Zipline analytics tool on Instagram.

Unlike PopTip questions, the product that launched the brand, Zipline doesn't require brands to poll or ask a question to their audiences. Instead, brands can simply choose which words, phrases, etc. they want tracked and then watch the conversations play out right in front of them.

'We saw some really interesting patterns regarding the relationship between browsing on Instagram and purchasing power, so we wanted to get on Instagram to track the conversation,' said co-founder Kelsey Falter. 'We have analysis going on Twitter and Instagram for Nike right now, and it turns out that there is 4x the volume of Nike mentions on Instagram than on Twitter, and that's powerful information for Nike to have.'

When PopTip first launched back in summer of 2012, the company offered a polling product, letting brands ask things like: 'do you wear #boxers or #briefs?'

PopTip would then offer a dashboard showing real time conversations around the questions and answers, even if respondents didn't use a hashtag or spell the word correctly. At its core, after all, PopTip technology is all about natural language processing and tracking in real-time.

At launch, the analytics tool was only available on Twitter.

But in March of 2013, the company expanded their tracking tools to Facebook, letting brands get a true window into their following across multiple platforms.

Shortly after, PopTip launched Zipline, which takes the 'polling' out of the equation and simply lets brands watch things play out as they normally would across social networks. With the launch of Zipline for Instagram, brands on PopTip can monitor the conversation across all three of the major network.

If you want to check out how Zipline on Instagram works, check out the demo here.

Zipline customers pay a flat rate of $6,500/month, which lets them track anywhere between 30 million and 50 million messages across all platforms.

PopTip has grown from 3 to 10 full-time employees, with 30 customers, including brands such as L'Oreal, NBA, ESPN, NFL, Spotify, Budweiser and Yoplait.

The New York-based company has raised a total of $2.5 million to date in angel funding from Lerer Ventures, SoftBank Capital, RSE Ventures, David Tisch, Scott Belsky, Soraya Darabi, Amer Rehman, Steve Martocci, Jared Hecht, Ori Allon, Tricia Black and Lee Ann Daly.