If you use social media, whether Twitter or Facebook, then you know the name Buzzfeed and have likely stumbled across one of their many viral articles. This company beats its competing publishers not just because of their engaging content, but also by implementing underlying technology that enables the company's tech team to better understand what gets read and how it's share. Recently, they've shared one of their tools that could also help your company: POUND.
What is POUND?
POUND (Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion) is a new technology that captures how articles and posts are spread throughout social networks. It follows unique hash tags in the user's URL to explore how items move from one sharer to the next and from one sharing platform to another network.
How can POUND data help my business?
- Understand successful content.
- One of the most important takeaways Buzzfeed found in researching stored POUND data was that sponsored content gets shared and re-shared just as much as editorial content. Collecting POUND data will enable you to start asking questions about what type of advertising content gets shared the most, and which stories will appeal not only to the targeted user, but also to their friends and followers.
- Understand your broader audience.
- You likely have a good grasp of who your niche audience is, but every company should look to reach beyond just their base following if they want to grow and evolve. Viral content is the single best way to attract new people to your product or service. But what goes viral? Collecting the data will enable you to filter out effects from other sources promoting your content so that you can learn about what the average user likes. This will put you on track to better understand your audience so that you can consistently put out the right type of content to boost your visibility. Where before you could only track shares on unique networks, here you can actually measure word-of-mouth sharing via specific hash URLs cross networks with the end-goal of optimizing new content.
- Understand the social web.
- Facebook is not the end-all be-all of advertising. You might post something to Facebook, a follower picks it up and re-tweets it, and then another reader e-mails it to their friend. POUND data enables you to learn how your content moves across the social web to understand movement beyond the initial hit and collect information on all of the downstreaming sharing and traffic. This can help you learn how effective specific promotions are and predict the potential reach of new content.
And all of this is just the beginning. Buzzfeed only just released information on POUND data and the potential opportunities could be even more significant. To learn more about this technology and how you can implement it, contact us ADTACK today.
