Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Buddy Media Acquires Spinback: E-Commerce Gets More Social

Marketing professionals are increasingly turning to social media to run promotions and word-of-mouth campaigns. Effective campaigns usually require mechanisms for tracking ROI and reach, and one such tool that can be used for this type of social analytics is Spinback. The New York-based startup has recently been acquired by Facebook marketing solutions provider Buddy Media.
Social Media Analytics Track the ROI of Your "Shares"

Sharing of content has become prevalent in websites, as evident in the "Tweet" and "Like" buttons that appear on blogs, websites and even e-commerce sites. According to Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow, most of these are added blindly, and users are unable to fully grasp the reach and conversions that social media buttons can provide. With Buddy Media's acquisition of Spinback, clients have a convenient means of tracking the performance of their social media linkages.

Tens of millions of websites have added sharing buttons. Very few of them, however, can actually tell you how many sales were driven by these buttons. With this acquisition, Buddy Media can now answer the question 'what is the ROI of social media?' better than anyone else in the market in a holistic way, both on Facebook and off, and on Twitter and email.

Spinback is essentially made up of two plugins that make up a comprehensive social commerce and analytics tool.

EasyShare Plugin allows users to share information about products or purchases to their social media contacts, via email Facebook, Twitter and blogs. This comes in the form of buttons, which can be use for easy sharing.
EasyTrack Analytics, meanwhile, is the back-end application that tracks how content is shared and recommended across social networks, and whether these get any conversions (through sales or other action).

How Effective Are Your Social Media Campaigns?

These two tools can be integrated in an e-commerce product page or checkout page, so that a user can easily make recommendations to their social contacts. In turn, Spinback's social analytics will help determine the following:

Total sales generated on one's website, Facebook page or Twitter account;
Most popular products in terms of being shared and re-shared;
Products with the best revenue per share;
Most profitable social network;
Customer segments or demographics mostly responsible for the most revenue from sharing activity.

When pieced together, the answers to these questions can help a marketer or webmaster tweak his content and social media activities to improve the performance and ROI on each piece of content posted and subsequently shared.

Buddy Media will be absorbing Spinback's team full-time, and will likewise be incorporating the current Spinback client base into its own. With the Spinback acquisition, Buddy Media is now able to provide social analytics both within Facebook and on external sites through the EasyShare and EasyTrack plugins.

Source: http://goo.gl/bz4mK

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