BuzzFeed Set Out to Revolutionise Sharing Analytics with Pound
Hive-Feed
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| niemanlab.com |
In ye olden times, putting out content was as simple as
publishing it and distributing it involved paying people to throw it around
elsewhere and/or say it’s great even if it’s not. Now it’s a maze of social
media sharing and stats tracking and it’s difficult to tell exactly how well
you’re doing. Even with analytics trackers, you can only really observe how
well a post is doing on a particular platform, rather than across multiple
ones. Now BuzzFeed of all people have stepped with a new formula, meet Pound.
An acronym for Process for Optimizing and Understanding
Network Diffusion, Pound "follows propagations from one sharer to another,
through all the downstream visits, even across social networks and one-to-one
sharing platforms like Gchat and email." According to BuzzFeed founder Dao
Nguyen. What this means in human speak is that Pound can track and collect
information about how well a post is doing for clicks and shares universally,
rather than just for Facebook, Twitter or wherever else. That might not seem
like a big deal, but it is.
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| buzzfeed.com |
See, it might seem as if once a post is shared on Facebook,
Facebook is where it stays, being liked and re-shared between friends and
connections but of course this isn’t necessarily the case. It might then be
shared in a private message, and then put on Pinterest as a result of that,
then forwarded in an email, by which point the stats trackers usually give up
and go to the pub. The digital pub, I guess, this metaphor is getting away from
me.
Pound is capable of processing over 10,000 web requests in a
single second and whilst BuzzFeed have only just unveiled it publically, it’s
been collating data for them for a while. A lot of data. It follows an
anonymous hash nestled in the post’s share URL and latches on a like a remora,
sending back information as the post travels like a bat sending sonic signals
and creating a detailed web of vital analytic info like some kind of crazy
techno-spider. That was a lot of animal similes for one sentence, I apologise,
but you get the gist.
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| fastcompany.com |
Remora-bat-spiders aside, the information can be used to
assess which posts should be optimised for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and
wherever else as well as how to better tailor content for organic searches and
gauge the effects of shares and posts by a particularly popular/famous user. It
also results in all kinds of awesome 3D visualisations, which makes social
media sharing look thrilling and cutting-edge.
It’s innovations like this that explain exactly why BuzzFeed
are doing as well as they are, given that there are hundreds of similar
websites putting out very similar content. As depressing as it is to say, it’s
not the content that builds their audience, it’s the way they use technology to
optimise social sharing. Those devious scoundrels. The entire reason they’ve
gone public with Pound is to appeal to partners, so that they can be a more of
an attractive option for sponsored posting. If you want to build your website's reader audience, look to their example.
Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @CallumAtSMF
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BuzzFeed Set Out to Revolutionise Sharing Analytics with Pound
Reviewed by Unknown
on
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Rating:
Reviewed by Unknown
on
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Rating:
Unknown
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