BuzzFeed Introduces Pound, A New Analytics Tool For Social Content

A few days ago, BuzzFeed, the American news media company ranked as 97th website in the world by Alexa, introduced a new analytics tool to analyze how content is shared. At BuzzFeed have understood the importance of tracking and analyzing how content becomes viral and how social users interact with it, so they decided to create a new ad hoc tool. This tool is called Pound. (Here you can read BuzzFeed original article)

READ ALSO: Mobile App Promotion Suite By Twitter

Pound stands for Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion and as BuzzFeed says “It follows propagations from one sharer to another, through all the downstream visits, even across social networks and one-to-one sharing platforms like Gchat and email.”

With Pound has been used the concept of “tree” (right part of the picture) to show how a post, originally posted on a social network, can be progressively shared other hundreds of times on other channels and generate traffic on the content page from different source every time. After analyzing all data, it was possible to apply the concept of “forest”. This forest is populated by hundreds or thousands of trees which are different all the time and which generate a different path of viralization every single time the post has been shared by someone. The goal is to analyze these paths and understand if there are correlations or rules to be applied to different categories of content, or topic.

All of this become more interesting when we talk about sponsored posts. The biggest goal is to be able to say “if you sponsor this kind of post with me (maybe with a picture), you should know that social users will be more likely to share it on these social networks, with these different levels of propagation and by these kind of people”. Or measure how celebrities or specific topics influence the viralization of a specific topic.

In this picture BuzzFeed shows how Pound measured the viralization of six posts they posted on their Twitter profile. The picture shows the Downstream Cascade, as they call it, that is the drill down through all the shares that the original tweet generated. Interesting to see that Twitter led to only 25% of total views, while the remaining 75% were coming from other platforms.

Currently, BuzzFeed is looking for beta partners to better test sponsored posts and understand if they work at the same way of traditional posts. Here are some questions they would love to answer:

 

• Can we propose stories that will appeal not only to you, but also to your friends and followers?
• Can we use Pound data to power A/B tests? Can we make the site and apps better not just for readers, but for their friends — and thereby increase the impact of our site?
• How effective are specific promotions, not just based on first-order traffic, but on all of the downstream sharing and traffic that results?
• Can we predict the potential reach of a story based on its content or other features about it?
• Can we filter out the effect of big sites or celebrities promoting our content, learn what average people actually like, and produce more of the right content for everyone?

 

Let’s see what happens when BuzzFeed will be able to find new partners!