Riding The Carousel Of Progress

At Blinkfire Analytics, we know the value of keeping up with the latest social media platform updates. As a software as a service (SaaS) company, our goal is to continuously improve Blinkfire and roll out these additional improvements as soon as possible. It is because we’re on constant alert for Instagram’s API updates that we are able to bring you our latest improvement today: brand spotting in carousels.

In case you are wondering what an API is, it stands for “Application Programming Interface” and it’s how software services from different companies talk to each other. We use them a lot. It’s how we’re able to bring you so much whoop-ass in one product with data from so many other services. But I digress.

Instagram rolled out the ability to post up to ten photos and videos in a single post in February this year. However, while on Instagram itself users were able to post carousel images, the API response for a carousel post with multiple images would label the media type as “image”, and show only the first image in a carousel. This means that if you are calculating valuations only using the first image, you aren’t finding all the exposure that you could for your sponsors. Finally, Instagram’s API has caught up to its mobile app. We worry about this stuff so you don’t have to.

We can now bring you full integration of carousels into your post valuations.

Social networks nowadays are competing with each other in a kind of feature-war, with one social platform trying its best to outdo the other. Because of this, all of the platforms tend to support displaying multiple images in one post, whether it’s called a carousel, a photo album, or just photo uploads. We decided to take the time to streamline the carousel across all social entities on our dashboard, so that no matter what kind of social media you’re looking at on Blinkfire, the multiple-images posts are clear and visible. Now, when you view your dashboard or other posts elsewhere on the platform, you’ll find a little icon like this indicating the post involves a carousel:

The above example is from Twitter, but it also works across Instagram, Facebook, VK, and Tencent.

From there, you can click on the post to sift through the various images, and see how your brands or sponsors faired with each.

It even works on posts that are years old, like this one on Tencent from 2013:

We’re proud to be able to bring carousel brand spotting to you, and can’t wait to continue to improve it further in the future!

As always, we are committed to our customers and their needs. If there is anything amiss, please do not hesitate to let us know.