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Sharing has changed the rules of the Web. It's easier for consumers to share anything and everything, so advertisers and publishers will need to adapt and adjust to that reality. What's the best way of doing that? Consider what underpins all social activity and what people are actually doing when they're on all these sites: They're sharing. Each share is a signal of affinity. That signal is powerful and something marketers can harness wherever consumers are. ShareThis' recently developed standard, the Social Quality Index, can help brands and advertisers make those important connections.
SQI is the first universal measure of webwide sharing activity—it's a standard that favors rich content over high reach. It values sites and content that generate the most user activity over larger sites that garner higher traffic scores. The index connects advertisers to users with higher purchase intent by identifying those consumers who have shared content around a specific, relevant vertical, product or service.
SQI takes into account the valuable social and sharing activity that precedes search, favoring active and influential audiences who are most likely to spread content across the Web. It allows ShareThis to provide measureable results, shedding light on such telling activities as site visitation, video views and brand affinity.
Founded in 2007 on the premise that sharing is more valuable to marketers than other online behaviors, ShareThis has quickly become the partner of choice to Fortune 500 brands as a better alternative to simple search and display marketing. Its sharing platform is unparalleled. ShareThis' innovative creative ad units incorporate sharing tools and experiences that encourage deep engagement by consumers. It analyzes what is clicked, what is shared and where it was shared. Then ShareThis can see what combination of these actions leads to deeper engagement by the user.
ShareThis reaches more than 85 percent of the U.S. population online across more than 1.6 million websites, and has built its business around the content that inspires sharing and the audiences that socialize it. For use by publishers or marketers, ShareThis inspires people to do more of what it believes is the foundation of digital life: sharing.
ShareThis Key Opportunities
SQI: How it works
- ShareThis measures sharing activity across more than 1.6 million sites and calculates SQI scores for each piece of content.
- Using the SQI metric, ShareThis delivers marketing messages alongside the content that generates the most sharing activity about a brand and its industry.
- By optimizing toward high SQI-rated sites, a marketer's campaign will reach the most social audiences and generate higher user engagement.
Wendy's engages influencers, harnesses the power of social media
ShareThis ran two campaigns with Wendy's to determine the impact on performance of delivering campaign messages on high SQI-rated sites. Throughout each campaign, ShareThis delivered 30 million impressions to the same audiences: the first set on non-SQI sites to determine a baseline and the second on high-SQI sites. When SQI-targeting was introduced:
- The click-through rate exceeded the campaign average by 209 percent.
- The volume of Wendy's menu page views increased 236 percent.
- Wendy's store locator inquiries increased 236 percent.
- WendyMail sign-ups increased 234 percent.
- The results were accomplished with nearly half the average cost per menu page view (0.61x), store locator inquiry (0.59x) and WendyMail sign-up (0.62x), taking total spending into consideration.
"We're talking about some impressive stats here," said Brandon Rhoten, director of digital marketing at Wendy's International. "SQI helped drive the most socially relevant audiences to the custom message we developed, creating a larger impact than any other paid part of this campaign. It helped us tap into audiences we wouldn't have been able to otherwise."
For more information, please visit www.sharethis.com/sqi.