Inside Mashable’s Tool That Maps How Branded Content Is Shared
Mashable is making a science out of predicting when a story is about to pop around the web, and now it’s built a tool to map how that virality ripples across the social sphere.
Mashable’s Knowledge Graph tool tracks how brands’ content posted to its site can pinball across various social networks, including difficult-to-track ones like email and text messaging. Mashable has been testing the tool with MasterCard — which has been running advertorials on Mashable tied to the publication’s Social Good Summit, of which MasterCard was a sponsor — and plans to preview it this week during a party at the Internet Advertising Bureau UK’s Digital Upfronts event in London.
Mashable’s Knowledge Graph deconstructs the traditional share count by visualizing how a tweet can lead to a number of retweets, which can lead someone to share the content on Facebook, which can lead someone else to share it via email or text message. Then it displays those shares in a web-like chart documenting how a given piece of content populates on one social network and then another, which can help a brand’s social marketers decide the progression of their posts. The tool’s data is anonymized, so brands won’t be able to identify the individuals that are able to ignite sharing among a wider net of people. But Mashable is talking with some outside companies about incorporating demographic data, which could inform brands’ media buys.
