It doesn’t take a vet­er­an social media man­ag­er to under­stand that social media has tak­en off big-time across the world; and that’s why brands and adver­tis­ers are scram­bling to fol­low what the word on the vir­tu­al-social street is about their prod­uct. And they’ve just been giv­en a sig­nif­i­cant help­ing hand in that quest, cour­tesy of New York social ana­lyt­ics start­up Pop­Tip, and its new offer­ing, Zipline for Instagram.

Social polling

Launched in sum­mer 2012, PopTip’s polling ana­lyt­ics plat­form began by let­ting brands ask social media users ques­tions like “do you wear #sneak­ers or #shoes?” The “#” gives it away: PopTip’s ser­vice was orig­i­nal­ly only avail­able on Twit­ter. Brands would see a dash­board giv­ing real-time con­ver­sa­tions and answers in response to the ques­tions they’d posed. Respon­dents didn’t even need to use a hash­tag or spell prop­er­ly – PopTip’s tech­nol­o­gy tracks nat­ur­al lan­guage in real-time.

By March 2013, the ser­vice was avail­able on Face­book too, giv­ing brands a broad­er win­dow on their fol­low­ing over mul­ti­ple plat­forms. In Octo­ber last year, Pop­Tip launched Zipline, an offer­ing that removes the need for polling. Brands don’t need to for­mu­late ques­tions on Zipline; they just select the words and phras­es they’d like to track, sit back and watch nat­u­ral­ly-occur­ring social con­ver­sa­tions involv­ing those terms play out before their eyes.

From polling to nat­u­ral­is­tic following

And now there’s Zipline for Insta­gram. Launched in Feb­ru­ary 2014, it allows brands to track con­ver­sa­tions across all three of the major social media networks.

Social media man­agers won­der­ing what dif­fer­ence this makes need only lis­ten to what co-founder Kelsey Fal­ter has revealed about the new offer­ing. Talk­ing to TechCrunch jour­nal­ist Jor­dan Crook, he said:

“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. 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.”

You don’t need to be a genius to work out that this kind of net­work-by-net­work com­par­i­son is pret­ty hot infor­ma­tion for a brand.

PopTip’s 30-plus ros­ter of cus­tomers includes Bud­weis­er, ESPN, L’Oreal, NBA, NFL and Yoplait, and it’s so far raised a cool $2.5 mil­lion in angel funding.