MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - April 20, 2010) - ShareThis, the world's largest sharing network, today released results from the first-ever advertising campaign using ShareThis Influence, a segmentation methodology which helps advertisers and publishers reach and identify social influencers. The company also announced new features for ShareThis Influence Insights, which gives publishers a better understanding of their audiences and how to monetize them.
Media and marketing agency Empower MediaMarketing used ShareThis Influence to create a test campaign for Mederma®, a leading US scar management brand for which Empower plans and places media, which would engage women with scars. As the largest sharing network, reaching over 400 million consumers and analyzing millions of social topics a month, ShareThis is able to find the "Influencers" (the people who share around topics targeted in the campaign), as well as their "Affected" friends (the people who respond to shared information). ShareThis ran influence-segmented creative against identical control creative, analyzing results across multiple segments based on the varying types of influence signals.
The results found that:
- Sharers are the most engaged. Target Influencers had a higher "intent to redeem" compared to search and display control campaigns. Half of the Influencers clicked through to a coupon download page, compared to 1-in-4 for usual search campaigns and 1-in-10 for contextual display campaigns.
- Sharing begets sharing. The Affected group, who responded to shared information from an Influencer, is an integral part of the sharing experience and value. These highly valuable consumers, who were influenced by their peers, were 1.6 times more likely to redeem than a contextual display campaign.
- Sharing outperformed search. Sharing performed as well or better than search in most metrics, while providing richer social context and less saturated targeting than traditional search campaigns can provide.
"Tapping into sharing on the web is an effective way to increase engagement and connect brands with extremely engaged audiences in a meaningful way," said Jim Price, president of Empower MediaMarketing. "Empower was the first to use ShareThis' Influence products, and it helped us increase intent to convert compared to other forms of search and display advertising we had conducted in the past."
ShareThis also announced new reports in the private beta of ShareThis Influence Insights, which lets publishers using ShareThis better understand the interests and behavior of their audiences in order to maximize advertising value. ShareThis Influence Insights allows participating publishers to:
- Better understand their site's social influence.
- Define and value custom social segments.
- Enter broad or niche topics for a campaign and choose a target CPM.
"As an innovator in all things social, Break Media believes in using signals like sharing to drive audience-based advertising campaigns," said Greg Huntoon, director of social media for Break Media. "We look forward to increasing the value of our premium display inventory by connecting brand advertisers with sought-after influencers on the hundreds of topics covered by the Break Media network."
Schigel from ShareThis, and Price from Empower MediaMarketing will give a presentation about the results of Mederma's campaign called "A New World of Word of Mouth: Using Influence to Re-invent the Impression" during ad:tech San Francisco at 4 p.m. on April 20 at Moscone Center North. Speakers can be found on Twitter here: http://tweepml.org/?t=386668
About ShareThis
ShareThis makes it easy to share ideas and get to the good stuff online. Reaching over 400 million users across 135,000 sites across the web, ShareThis is changing the economics of online publishing by creating a market of influence across the Web. ShareThis allows users to share content from anywhere to anyone while simultaneously enabling publishers and advertisers to tap the value of sharing. Based in Mountain View, Calif., the company is privately held with funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Blue Chip Venture Company, DFJ Mercury, Reservoir Partners, Illinois Ventures, Queen City Angels and RPM Ventures.
Contact Information:
Media Contacts:
Corey Lewis or Virginia Zimpel
LaunchSquad
sharethis(at)launchsquad(dot)com
+1 415 625 8555