'Net Features : curalate

Curalate for Instagram: Analytics for Visual Social Platforms

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:30:00 GMT

Social media analytics are the hot sector right now among the digerati and big brands are jumping on the bandwagon in digital droves.

Zappos’ recent selection of Pinfluencer, for example, to help manage and analyze its promotional efforts on the network is sufficient proof for many that brands are finally starting to figure this whole "visual social media" thing out - at least in part. As many brands are quickly discovering, Pinterest is far from the only horse in the visual/social race. Facebook-owned Instagram is making moves and the savviest social media analytics providers are well aware of its potential to influence prospective and existing customers and users.

Case in point, visual analytics and marketing platform Curalate recently announced the availability of analytics and promotion solutions for Instagram, making it the first (if not only) vendor to bring analytics from Pinterest and Instagram analytics into one consolidated dashboard.

The updated platform enables brands to understand image popularity (and recency), consolidate conversations on both Pinterst and Instagram into one feed, create promotions on the two visual networks (and Facebook), share photos directly from within the platform's dashboard, and analyze performance of their Instagram campaigns as well. One of the more appealing features is the ability for brand users to differentiate between engagement on fan-posted and brand-posted images.

“Images drive emotions with an immediacy that no other medium offers. Brands are rapidly tapping into the power of imagery to connect with consumers and drive real business results,” said Apu Gupta, CEO and co-founder, Curalate. “By adding Instagram to our successful Pinterest solution we’re helping brands see the bigger picture. Curalate enables brands to engage audiences across networks based on what’s most relevant rather than what’s most recent.”

Screenshot of the Hashtag feature within Curalate which is used for tracking social promotions on Pinterest and now Instagram

Pinterest Promotion's Puzzle Solved

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:16:00 GMT

Finding participants and ensuring eligibility and legality are among some of the time-consuming issues businesses face when running a sweepstakes or contest on Pinterest. The popularity of the giveaways, however, keeps increasing.

Creative freedom is one of the many reasons these Pinterest promotions are so popular. Sharad Verma, CEO of Pinfluencer, a marketing analytics and promotions platform, says Pinterest contests or sweepstakes are not just about winning, but they are also about fun and creativity. Participants don’t just hit a “like” button to enter, instead, many contests require them to collect items and put them on their board.

For example, the popular retailer Express ran a “Win Your Wish List” campaign. Entrants gathered items from Express’s Pinterest boards and/or website to their boards for a chance of winning a $500 Express gift card.

This contest is a strong indicator of Pinterest’s e-commerce prowess. Additionally, Pinterest serves as an e-commerce driver because people are collecting products for themselves, and so that lead to low-barrier sharing. Plus, every pin is virtually a hyperlink, which makes Pinterest really a collection of links. Another benefit (in the long line of them) is that people using Pinterest are in a mode to shop, as they are actively planning a party, wedding, trip – you name it.

“Pinning is an act of getting ownership of the product,” said Verma. “Sharing happens as a byproduct of that.”

As for SEO value, Pinterest has it – just in a roundabout way.

“The links on Pinterest are no follow, which means that sites do not get link credit for those,” said Verma. “But the boards can be SEO’d, and they can rank when searchers search for that brand’s name. Really, Pinterest is a catalog in an interesting, unique board.”

For those companies looking to run a Pinterest promotion, and reduce some of the friction associated with them, there are tools can help.

One is the aforementioned Pinfluencer. Launched in Feb. 2012, the platform has hosted and tracked more than 50 holiday promotions for brands, such as Gilt, Jetsetter, WayFair, Martha Stewart, Shape Magazine, and others reaching nearly a half million Pinterest users.

Brands who ran their contests and sweepstakes on Pinfluencer increased their follower acquisition rate by 156 percet while their Pins/day jumped by 125 percent.

The way it works is Pinfluencer creates a Web-based platform for brands, retailers, publishers and agencies to easily create turn-key contest and sweepstakes marketing campaigns on Pinterest and boost audience engagement, site traffic and virality. The platform allows marketers to deploy custom branded contests and sweepstakes with significantly improved user experiences for the participants, resulting in higher entry rates. The dashboard also provides insights into clicks and revenue and saves marketers hours of manual work by automatically tracking user eligibility and allows them to proactively interact with the ineligible participants to maximize the success of the promotion.

“With Pinfluencer we were able to easily run a successful scavenger-type contest that generated 7 million impressions of our Jetsetter pins on Pinterest,” said Jonathan Goldmann, head of social at Jetsetter.com said. “Pinfluencer’s Promotions dashboard tracked not just participants and pins, but also ROI metrics like revenue and clicks and made the reporting very intuitive.”

A scavenger-type contest is one promotion type that can be ran on Pinfluencer’s Pinterest promotions platform. Others include create-a-board contests (like Express’s), repin to a board and pin to win.

WayFair, a U.S.-based e-commerce company, leveraged Pinfluencer to create its "Turkey Day Tabletop" challenge.

"We challenged users to pin items for their ideal Thanksgiving table and spread, dishware, centerpieces, recipes and décor," said WayFair Senior Manager of Social Media Trisha Mack. "We saw a 34 percent lift in eligible entries and a 21 percent growth in pins/day from wayfair.com (compared to the same three-week period previous to the contest). In terms of ROI, we saw about a 27 percent increase in referral traffic and revenue coming from Pinterest during the contest period."

Prior to leveraging Pinfluencer services, WayFair held four contests on Pinterest, on its own. These proved to be clunky, as people were required to email a link of their completed board to WayFair.

Pinfluencer streamlines the process, as companies can host the promotions on Facebook or on their own websites, easily build a contest with custom rules from a menu of options and use the Pinfluencer tracker and dashboard to determine how a contest is performing, check participants’ eligibility and track them. Finally, the platform makes it easy to judge boards and rank participants.

“Marketers can host their contests and sweepstakes on a Facebook tab powered by Pinfluencer and convert their Facebook fans into avid pinners on Pinterest. Every pin has a traffic and sales driving potential,” said Verma.

Curalate, a marketing platform for the visual Web, also offers a Pinterest module – dubbed Promote. This service also reduces some of the challenges marketers face when running a contest on Pinterest by integrating registration, management and tracking into its platform (as opposed to using disparate systems to accomplish the same result).

By making contests easier, Curalate has increased participation and engagement for its clients, which includes Carnival Cruise Lines (see results here).

And, as Pinterest cruises to be more top of mind with marketers, Web workers should expect more Pinterest platforms to capitalize on the overwhelming amount of social and e-commerce potential it has.

Pinterest is also recognizing its power. It is offering more and more business-related tools and guidance, including those for promotions. Check out Pinterest's tips on running a promotion, here.

Pinterest Brand Intelligence with Curalate

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:20:00 GMT

The marketing mania of Pinterest has waned a bit the past several weeks, but that’s hasn’t stopped consumers from visiting the site (see Compete.com chart below) or brands seeking ways to participate on the social pinboard site.

But if we’ve learned anything from social media – in whatever form it comes (visual or otherwise) – it is that you can’t effectively manage participation if you can’t measure it (and you sure as heck can’t monetize it either).

Enter Curalate, a newly launched service that enables brands to discover, track, and yes, even measure the sharing that is occurring on visual platforms like Pinterest. Curalate aims to reveal a brand's true Pinterest presence by understanding the activities coming from a brand website as well as from their Pinterest page. The platform, which offers a free trial, goes quite a bit deeper, however – something that its 150+ brands starting with the service at launch were likely drawn towards. Curalate also offers a way to consolidate the conversations that are occurring on Pinterest, helping brands engage with their brand-endorsing pinners more effectively.

"Before brands put serious money towards a new social network, they need to be able to measure and monitor their brand engagement," said Apu Gupta, Curalate's CEO and co-founder. "Today's launch, and the 150+ brands and agencies we've signed up, show just how important it is for brands to make sense of and benefit from today's socially curated sites."

As you can see in the chart from Compete.com below, Pinterest keeps growing. Will it continue? And will platforms such as Curalate increase participation from brands?

"The emergence -- and popularity -- of sites such as Pinterest, Instagram, Fancy and Wanelo show us the power and universal appeal of communicating through images, not just text," said Patrick Chung, partner at NEA – who just led a $750,000 financing round for Curalate (along with First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures. "These sites give brands the ability to identify and understand the products people care about right now so that brands can dynamically adapt their e-commerce strategies to target the products that are top of the mind -- for each individual mind."