Increasingly, people are shopping on Instagram. Check out the #forsale or #buynow hastags -- they are full of crazy items. And if you are trying to sell on Instagram, consider using Tag Sleuth to find the influencers and big shoppers of your wares. Start a hashtag archive of whatever you are selling and then use the Top Users feature to find the people who matter. Instagram just keeps getting bigger: stay on top of what's happening with Tag Sleuth!

We've now migrated the site to use embedded Tweets and embedded Instagram posts. This means you can see Twitter videos and images associated with a Tweet and you can use the Instagram video player. You can also follow people directly, retweet, repost and all the other social media goodness. We think it is a great improvement.

Check out Gartner's guide on picking a social media analytics provider.

There's some great advice in there, in fact here are the core recommendations when trying to pick a vendor:

Recommendations

• Identify gaps in your current social analytics capabilities, anticipating increased desire for actionable insights from other teams in your organization.
• Determine the required integration with multichannel marketing, advertising and CRM systems. Independent providers vary in their support of these functions, while many marketing cloud vendors now provide native social analytics capabilities or preconfigured integrations with preferred partners.
• Take a realistic look at how you will distribute and act on the insights you get from social analytics. Vendors often differentiate their products through data visualizations, mobile alerts, and proprietary sentiment analysis methodologies. Determine your core requirements versus nice-to-haves.

Along with recommendations, there are vendors explicitly assessed, but as they say, "The vendors listed in this Market Guide do not imply an exhaustive list. This section is intended to provide more understanding of the market and its offerings."

Tag Sleuth and Tweet Archivist aren't explicitly mentioned. Interestingly, all the vendors listed charge 10x to 100x for the same kinds of services. Our services remain the low cost alternative, still providing the same core services that the listed vendors provide. Everything in the article applies.  We don't have all the features, but as Gartner says, "Determine your core requirements versus nice-to-haves."

Could you reclaim a large swath of your marketing budget by switching to Tweet Archivist or Tag Sleuth as your social media analytics provider? Start a free trial and find out if we have the features you need,

Using our sister site, Watch Social Media, we created a bunch of Instagram video compilations from the current cast of SNL. Check it out below:

And remember it is easy as pie to create your own Instagram video compilations over at Watch Social Media

We recently received a question from a possible customer:

"Hi there! I am really excited about your product. I want to be sure that it does everything I need it to before paying. We are doing a holiday campaign where people enter by submitting a photo with a special hashtag on Instagram or Twitter. I want to be sure to capture all submissions on both platforms. Will Tag Sleuth do that?

"Additionally, I would like to be able to export the results to a spreadsheet so that I can pick a winner. Is that something I can do?"

The answer is yes, yes and yes!  Tag Sleuth is designed for the above scenario and we invite you to start a free trial to give it a try.