BuzzFeed Maps Social Sharing's Ripple Effect With New Analytics Tool

BuzzFeed has built its business on publishing articles that get widely shared across various social channels, including Facebook and Twitter. Now it has a new way to better measure the relationship of those shares. On Monday at its NewFronts presentation, BuzzFeed announced an analytics tool that tracks how a piece of BuzzFeed content gets shared from one channel to the next. As opposed to only seeing that a story got X tweets, Y Facebook shares and Z Pinterest pins, the tool can show that, hypothetically, a tweet directly led to 20 Facebook shares and 7 Pinterest pins. Called POUND, which stands for Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion, the tool is able to trace this cross-platform sharing by tracking an anonymous code included in an article's URL. The tool doesn't expose the identities of the individuals who shared a piece of content, according to the company. While the tool appears beneficial for BuzzFeed's editorial team to see how their articles and videos ripple across the social web, it could also help its ad sales staff by relaying to advertisers more information about the sponsored posts they pay BuzzFeed to create. Brands could use that information to get a better idea of what type of content pops on which social channels and how. "We are actually now looking for beta partners that will help us think about how to make pound a great advertising product," said BuzzFeed's publisher Dao Nguyen, announcing the tool on stage at the company's NewFront event in New York. BuzzFeed announced another analytics product of interest to brands that appears to be more developed. The company has created a video dashboard for brands that will compile all the data from the video campaigns an advertiser runs through BuzzFeed into one place. That product will be available later this year, Ms. Nguyen said.

BuzzFeed Maps Social Sharing's Ripple Effect With New Analytics Tool

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