Category: Social Media Marketing

The largest social network in the world has patented tech to identify those whose influence is the most powerful.

Facebook is always looking for a new way to monetize, particularly when it comes to the lucrative area of social media marketing, and now it has started in yet another direction as it has patented technology that will allow it to spot the top “influencers” among its users.

This is all a part of Facebook’s broader strategy to keep ahead of what its users want while they use the site or apps.

Once it has determined what its users are into at any given time, then the next phase of its social media marketing strategy is to discover those people who will purchase such a user base. It can therefore successfully market content that its users will be able to discover and share. The outcome is that groups of consumers are formed for interested marketers to be able to target. The big data analysis at Facebook has given the company the ability to identify the individual users who are most responsible for creating the largest responses in a group; the “influencer”.

The company has now patented the codes necessary to discover the influencers who give social media marketing the most potential.

The patent for this marketing technology was first filed in 2011by the head of Ads at Facebook Inc, Andrew Bosworth. The company was able to obtain the patent only a week later. It is somewhat similar to other patents that are held by other industry giants such as Microsoft Corporation, Yahoo! Inc., and Google Inc. According to many analysts, the Facebook patent is especially ingenious for “Influencer Marketing”.

The marketing code from Facebook differs from that of other giants in that it provides a highly simplified method of spotting the celebrity influencers. The analogy from the company is that it finds the “expert”, first. That account will then encourage a share from the influential celebrity, creating a number of follower sharing explosions that are quite strong in themselves. The competition’s social media marketing strategy is more focused on the size of an influencer’s connections or the strength of that influencer’s followers.

The micro-blogging social network has taken a heavy focus on advertising on smartphones and tablets.

Twitter experienced a considerable jump in its stock price – initially leaping by over 6 percent – when it announced that it would be adding promoted tweets on third party mobile apps, as well as smartphone friendly websites, as a part of a broader advertising distribution program that it has now launched.

This new mobile advertising strategy is designed to help to broaden the reach of the social network’s ads.

This will allow Twitter to be able to reach into other mobile apps and websites in order to place ads in front of a much larger number of viewers. It will expand the number of potential ad viewers well beyond the 284 million estimated users who actively use the micro-blogging service every month. The first partners that have joined with Twitter in this advertising program include Yahoo Japan and the Flipboard newsreader app.

There are already thousands of brands that advertise on Twitter and they could now benefit from ads on additional mobile apps.

According to a post that Twitter added to its official blog, “For the thousands of brands already advertising on Twitter, these new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience.”

This announcement was made very shortly before the financial results for the fourth quarter were announced by the company. The stock price has been facing some considerable pressure over the last while. In fact, when compared to its 52 week high point that brought it to $67.24, it has faced a drop of a whopping 40 percent. This meant that the 6.5 percent increase that it saw at the initial announcement of its new third party advertising partnerships was an especially welcome change from the direction that it had been taking.

This is believed to be only the start of the partnerships that will be forming between Twitter and various mobile apps and websites around the world. It will be interesting to watch as new applications come aboard and to view the impact that this will have on the stock price over time.