DataSift Provides Complete Insight Into Social Content Engagement With bitly Partnership

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Nov 15, 2012) - DataSift, the leading social data platform company, today announced a strategic partnership with bitly that will now enable businesses to gain deeper insights into their brand advocates and customer engagement by analyzing social conversations and clickstreams together, providing a comprehensive view of consumer engagement with social content.

Throughout the first wave of social, companies were limited to simply listening, using the number of tweets, posts, likes and comments to measure customer engagement with social content. The next phase of social will integrate those metrics with the most important measurement of all -- how many people clicked to view the content -- to drive action based on deep analysis derived from social data. Until now, the intersection of social metrics and web metrics has been disconnected, and the partnership between DataSift and bitly solves that problem by delivering a complete view of social engagement, enabling organizations to optimize social strategy and drive growth.

Marketers spend 33% of their budget on content marketing, with a 54% increase in spend projected in 2013¹. Using DataSift, marketers can now make more informed, data-driven decisions based on measuring the social reach, engagement and click-through of their content as it is shared socially across the web. This enables them to measure the impact and effectiveness of social marketing, shift strategy to focus on creating content that better engages customers, as well as prove ROI on content marketing spend.

The DataSift and bitly partnership enables companies to analyze both social conversations and click trends together for the first time. Examples include:

• Measure and Increase Customer Engagement: Build a content creation-strategy that drives maximum engagement by measuring the social click-through rates for content, applying SEO to your social content to benchmark your company's social impact.
  
  
• Measure the New ROI - Return on Influencers: Remove guesswork from PR and influencer engagement by measuring the impact of your launch across news and media. Track and respond to issues and opportunities based on what the world is reading.
  
  
• Optimize Your Campaign Content: Identify fresh, popular content that is trending socially to curate more engaging content for your audience and expand content reach.
  

As the world's most popular link-sharing platform, bitly is used to share more than 80 million new links every day, with more than 200 million clicks per day on a bitly link -- providing unparalleled insight into what the social world is paying attention to. This year alone, bitly has added hundreds of thousands of registered users and in Q3 2012, the company raised an impressive $15 million in additional funding to further their growth and position them as the market-leading social discovery and sharing hub.

DataSift also announced this week that it has received $15 million in Series B funding led by Scale Venture Partners. Additional participants in the round included current investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures, along with new investors Northgate Capital and Daher Capital. Both the partnership and the funding round come at a time when the company's growth is accelerating across a wide variety of customer groups and geographies.

Comments on the news:

"A large percentage of social network users leverage Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites as their only vehicles to consume and share news and information. This is why it's critical for companies to pay close attention to their social customers and how they are engaging with their content," said Rob Bailey, CEO, DataSift. "Our partnership with bitly allows us to complete the social engagement picture in a way that's never been done before, providing true insight and shining light onto previously untapped social data."

"bitly has been on the forefront of helping consumers and businesses discover, share and curate content for years," said Peter Stern, CEO, bitly. "Thanks to our partnership with DataSift, we are helping companies find actionable insights from social media based on the best metric of engagement: a click."

"Social data has evolved from providing simple metrics to delivering critical insights that help brands better target product marketing and customer service efforts", said Adam Schoenfeld, co-founder and CEO of Simply Measured. "DataSift's new integration with bitly enables us to provide rich strategic analysis on link data the same way we do for social data, helping marketers see the bigger picture and optimize their customer engagement efforts for the greatest impact."

"The addition of the bitly data source to DataSift will provide an unprecedented, end-to-end view into social content engagement," said Mike Smitheman, Vice President of Marketing, GoodData. "This will become a key component of our GoodData Bash offering as it will enable our customers to take their social content strategy to the next level."

"The ability to integrate analytics on Twitter content with analytics on links brings two sources of information together for value that is much more than the sum of its parts," said Alys Woodward, Research Director, European Business Analytics, Enterprise Collaboration and Social Solutions, IDC. "Filtering down both types of information together means organizations can really start to get to grips with the effects of information sharing on Twitter, and how it really affects their customers, brands and perception."

Availability
The bitly data stream is available to DataSift subscription customers as of today. For more information, visit www.datasift.com.

About DataSift
DataSift Inc. is the leading social data platform, enabling companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, leading social networks and millions of other sources. DataSift provides access to both real-time and historical social data to uncover insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion. Key investors include Scale Venture Partners, GRP Partners, and IA Ventures. DataSift has offices in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Reading, U.K. For more information, visit www.datasift.com and follow us on Twitter @datasift.

¹ Source: MarketingProfs 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report