By: Dan Sullivan
I was fortunate to have my piece on Facebook sunsetting sponsored stories featured on AllFacebook.com this week, and really interested in all of the conversation it generated. Obviously the implications are top of mind for many people in the industry.
In it, I detailed how the end of sponsored stories along with marrying social endorsements into every other ad format might bring along increased EdgeRank and organic reach, and squarely emphasizes how brands must activate a core base of superfans to achieve effective reach, either paid or earned. You can read more about it here.
This is a very important move to us at Crowdly, as genuine, measurable advocate activation of a brand’s existing Facebook fan base is at our absolute core. Facebook is clearly moving towards a direction we wholeheartedly welcome, where the most successful brands will be the ones that are able to engage their base and use these superfans as ambassadors to reach their own friends. Visibility in the newsfeed is going to be less about competitors buying everyone else out, and more about what a brand can get it’s best people to say about them, and the brands that you do see will be more relevant, and endorsed by people you know.
If you’ve followed us on social, our bylines, or through our blog, you know we hold off on touting our own product too heavily, and of course a sentence like that is inevitably followed by me doing just that, but we’ve had a lot of inquiries after our latest post, and this is a time of transition and strategic adjustment for many Facebook marketers. Rather than just illustrate exactly what is changing, people have reached out for clarification or opinion on how best to benefit from these changes.
The challenges around positioning for this evolution are exactly what our product enables for the large brands and agencies we work with. Typically the brands we work with have at least 100,000 fans, and no good way of knowing who their top 5% are. Crowdly is very different than anything else out there because we put the people, not the trends, data, or the aggregate at the core of what we do. Only Crowdly can identify who all of a brand’s existing advocates are, full context on their interactions with the brand, great ways to activate them either en masse, by segment, or one to one, and practical, actionable measurements our brands have always wanted but never seen before. And, from a completely unbiased perspective of course, we can give a killler demo in half an hour that if nothing else will give you real insights on your own brand.
If you’re interested in seeing a little bit more, we’d love to chat and show you what we’ve been up to. Feel free to shoot me an email at dan@crowdly.com, or the team at info@crowdly.com and let’s talk.
