Video credit by Tim Forster.
When my wife Kass and I started Buddy Media in late 2007, we had a feeling Facebook would be large. Very large. But we had no idea that it would boast 600 million members globally in just a few years and represent more than a third of all ad impressions in the US.
We have spent the past three and a half years figuring out how we can help major brand advertisers, retailers and publishers engage audiences and build their businesses using Facebook. Today’s acquisition of Spinback, a New York-based company that provides comprehensive social commerce and analytics tools, helps us show our clients return on investment on these efforts like never before.
Spinback answers this ROI question for marketers through two primary products.
The first, EasyShare Plugin, allows customers to easily share content, products and purchases to Facebook, email, Twitter and blogs in just a few clicks. The second, EasyTrack Analytics, measures and tracks how consumers share and recommend content and products across the social web and closes the loop on conversions. Check out the video posted above that details the offering.
By combining sharing and conversion tracking into one elegant technology solution, Spinback shows how sharing drives sales, and any conversion event, like site registration, downloads, completed forms and more. Combining robust web-wide sharing and tracking technology with the industry leading Facebook marketing platform makes a ton of sense to us.
Over the past decade, millions of sites have blindly added sharing functionality without understanding how these tools drive sales or conversions. We plan to change that with Spinback’s easy-to-implement solution.
What questions will Buddy Media and Spinback now be able to answer?
- What are the total sales generated by sharing on my web site, Facebook Page or Twitter account?
- What products are being shared and re-shared most frequently?
- Which products are driving the most revenue per share?
- What is my most profitable social network?
- Which customer segments are responsible for the most revenue from sharing?
I was impressed with the Spinback product and team from our first meeting earlier this year. Since launching in October 2010, the company has signed up more than 20 clients and received significant in-bound interest from the best investors in the space. Ultimately, the addition of the Spinback technology to the Buddy Media Platform offering fit too well to ignore and we were fortunate to come to a mutual agreement with the Spinback team that lead to this acquisition.
As part of the deal, Spinback's entire team will join Buddy Media full-time, adding one of the most talented teams in the space to Buddy Media. The Spinback team "gets" social commerce. The founding CTO, Paul Boutin, was the founder and CTO of Payvment, the largest commerce application on Facebook. And Andrew Ferenci and Corey Capasso bring equally as impressive product development and sales expertise.
I am proud to say that the Buddy Media team was the first to launch a Facebook page management system in March 2009, soon after the Facebook Page product launched. We were the first to launch a global solution that geo-targeted content based on the user’s location and language. We pioneered the concept of a fully integrated Facebook Wall moderation and management suite. And let’s not forget that we invented the drag-and-drop Facebook tab environment, as well as many other firsts.
So it should come as no surprise that this deal makes Buddy Media the first and only social management platform to close the loop on tracking true ROI both on Facebook and off. Stay tuned for more exciting firsts coming down the pike as we don’t plan to stop innovating through internal development and acquisition anytime soon!
I officially want to welcome with open arms the extended Spinback team -- including the founders, employees, advisers, investors, and, of course, clients -- to the Buddy Media family. We look forward to continuing to build a massive business with you.
For more information, please read the official announcement. You can also sign up for a webinar on Monday June 13th, at 2pm EST where will go over the Spinback platform and answer all of your questions.
