Geoffrey Fowler and Amir Efrati at the Wall Street Journal recently took a look at the Facebook “Like” button and what it has – or hasn’t – done for publishers so far. It’s an interesting read and one that features our client ShareThis’ CEO Tim Schigel, who talks about the need for publishers to retain the data they collect from readers, something that’s harder to do when they’re routed through Facebook.
Knowing which customers share website information is valuable because it lets publishers see which users are influential, meaning they drive a lot of traffic back to their sites. “To the extent that any third party comes in and knows more and can extract more value than the publishers themselves, they can be worried,” Mr. Schigel said.
ShareThis is really carving new ground for publishers and advertisers with their influence-based ad targeting platform. ShareThis believes everyone who shares is an influencer. From sending an e-mail to your mom to posting an interesting article on a friend’s Facebook page, sharing is the most valuable social interaction online. ShareThis’ segmentation methodology allows advertisers and publishers to reach and identify social influencers.
For example, during a recent campaign for skin care cream Mederma, ShareThis found a 56 percent rate of engagement among people who shared information about or related to scarring or stretch marks, as compared to 26 percent with traditional search and 8 percent with contextual display advertisement. This type of targeting is getting closer to the Holy Grail for advertisers and marketers: taking usage patterns, data and other information about how people use social media to build and segment audiences and use that to target audiences. This is also why sharing is so valuable – it holds the raw data necessary to connect these dots.
ShareThis is continuing to push the limits on what publishers and advertisers can extract from social media and use that to drive revenue, which, as we all know, publishers are very anxious to do nowadays. We’re excited to be along for the ride