Socialcam slipstreams Instagram by cornering mobile video sharing market

While Instagram has cornered the market in mobile photo sharing using vintage filters, another startup called Socialcam is carving out its own presence in mobile video sharing.
It recently hit 3 million downloads and has been described as the most talked about video app by the New York Times.    The nifty little app allows you to create videos of any length with custom filters. All videos are stored in the cloud and viewable from any device.  You can share on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even SMS.
Their marketing team released usage figures late last year that offer an interesting glimpse into how people are deploying Socialcam videos, especially filters:

• 5% of videos shares on Socialcam have filters
• 400k downloads
• 84% increase in daily app opens
• 69% increase daily video viewers
• 50% increase in video creation
• Most popular filters: 70’s & Electronica

At the same time they announced that:

• Facebook videos now appear in Socialcam (with synced comments/likes)
• Socialcam videos can now be uploaded to YouTube
• Video analytics are now available on the Socialcam website

While most small business websites hosted on affordable hosting platforms are using Google Analytics to track visitors, page views and conversions, it appears the Socialcam team has opted for a paid, proprietary package called Mixpanel.  This package also allows them to track advanced A/B testing customized to their business model. (Note: They do have a free version!)
“Mixpanel allows us to log events with associated properties, and provides a web interface to slice and analyze the results. Basically, Socialcam is chock-full of Mixpanel events. Now, this does get expensive (especially given our recent growth! Ouch Mixpanel bill!). Rather than reduce our logging, however, we decided to sample users. That is, only one out of every N users logs anything to Mixpanel. We get complete data on a sample of our users,” said Socialcam.
Mixpanel allows website owners, web designers and web developers to build complex queries without writing SQL.    For instance, Mixpanel gives the example of answering complex questions such as “Show me the age breakdown of people who are male, from the United States, and viewed the pricing page” with just a few mouse clicks.  It also has other features including dynamic bucketing, which uses segmentation to provide visual pieces of data.
By the way, check out the latest trending videos on the Socialcam website including a video about a giant snake that eats a security guard!