Buy Friends and Influence People
Finally social networks have a means for selling their most value asset, agencies have a new way to charge commission on social network buys and the industry has yet one more metric to use in evaluating the success of online plans that increasingly incorporate social networks and sites bought on a CPM model.
Marketers who use social networks have accustomed themselves to reaching numbers counted in hundreds, not millions. The loss of volume has been offset by the quality of the audience and the higher engagement with the brand. While organic growth is the most desirable, the going can be slow and the required effort high.
Enter now a way to speed this growth. The BBC reported earlier this week that Australian company uSocial is selling the CPF concept; if you engage uSocial they will find your brand followers on Twitter.
They offer fans in blocks of 1000 up to 100,000 and the followers are validated. uSocial profiles Twitter users that have interests in line with a brand’s target and then inform these pre-identified prospects about the brands’ twitter feed. uSocial only gets paid for the followers that independently sign up for your feed.
Anticipating a new product launch, special offer or just testing a new commercial? uSocial can get you an audience. CPF has the potential to be at least the beginning of a means to manage and measure marketing on social networks. This is critical for social networks to evolve to the next level of marketing tool.
Social networks don’t deliver results measurable by CTR, CPA, or CPC. This isn’t surprising as they were not designed to support effective advertising. Advertising on Facebook is analogous to inserting a telemarketing message into an ongoing private telephone call or perhaps more accurately conference call.
uSocial’s offering blends the organic aspects of social marketing with tools that address the issues of scale always in question in this space. Questions abound. Is a bought fan of equal value to the brand as one who showed up on their own? How will CPF rates be set? Will a science develop around designing target specs that bring in fans that consistently engage? Fan optimization?
But even now having one million fans doesn’t mean they will are repeat visitors, or even visit often. Measures of what have been traditionally understood as frequency are still way out of reach on social networks. But who knows? With a little ingenuity in time that too will be addressed.
In the meantime uSocial seems worth a trial run. And your consumers have a real opportunity to pimp their tweet.
