February 19, 2013
By Judith Aquino,

Curalate Adds Instagram Analytics and Promotions Features to Platform

Curalate, a visual analytics and marketing software provider, today unveiled its new Instagram analytics and promotions features, giving users the ability to track images and analytics from both Pinterest and Instagram on one dashboard. Using its proprietary image tracking algorithms, Curalate helps companies like HGTV, Gap, and Michael Kors identify images that are garnering a large number of likes and comments across the Web and highlight those images on their social media sites.

"A lot of people are posting photos of their favorite products on Instagram and Pinterest, and for a popular brand, it's hard to keep track of all those photos and figure out which ones are the most popular," observes Apu Gupta, CEO and cofounder of Curalate. "Instead of just showing brands the most recent photos of their products that are being shared, we're making it easier to find the photos that are driving the most fan engagement."

Similar to the way that a marketer might retweet a customer's glowing tweet about its brand and share it on their other social media sites, Curalate enables marketers to share users' Instagram photos on their Pinterest board and other social media sites.

The denim brand 7 For All Mankind, for example, used Curalate to identify the Instagram pictures most popular among its fans and used those images to create a Facebook ad campaign. It's up to each company to decide if they will first ask for the users' permission to share those photos, according to Gupta. "We're not advocating that brands use these images as direct endorsements, but a lot of them are in the public domain," he says.

In terms of analytics, Curalate's platform enables brands to differentiate between engagement levels with fan-posted and brand-posted images, track conversion rates on Pinterest, and track, segment, and compare the performance of Instagram campaigns.

Headquartered in Philadelphia with offices in New York City, Curalate is backed by NEA, First Round Capital, and other venture capitalists.