Buzzfeed and Twitter seek to turbo-charge content marketing

A change to promoted tweets and a new tool that analyzes how articles are shared across social media could bolster brands’ online efforts.

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Two recent announcements seek to make the processes more effective for the growing number of PR, marketing and social media pros moving to online campaigns.

Buzzfeed recently introduced Pound, a technology that tracks a piece of content’s spread across social media platforms.

Though there are lots of tools and services that track social media shares, most of them group the data in “buckets,” meaning PR and marketing pros see only how much content is shared on each social platform, not how an individual social media site affects the spread of an article, picture or video.

Buzzfeed publisher Dao Nguyen wrote in a blog post that over 75 percent of Buzzfeed’s 200 million monthly users come from social media. Pound enables brand managers to see what happens when a tweet is then shared on Facebook, prompting another follower to share it in a blog post, and so on.

Nguyen said Buzzfeed’s content can be initially shared by hundreds or thousands of people. That means the actual path of a piece of content is much larger than a tree diagram shows—it’s more like an entire forest. She shared the following picture to illustrate her point:

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