Social media marketing is part science—and if there is a secret formula to creating content, then surely marketers equipped with the latest data tools will find it.
Companies like Percolate, fresh off a $24 million fundraising round, help brands and agencies develop their content marketing. Then, there are players like Gnip, which indexes all of Twitter, and Brandwatch, which analyzes all this information.
Brands are always finding new social sites to engage, new types of content to create—and more ways to message.
Noah Brier, CEO of Percolate, likes to say marketers used to create five messages a year and now they create five a minute—Vine videos, Twitter replies, Instagram photos.
“Content is the atomic unit of marketing,” said Brier, whose company announced last week that it had raised funding via WPP and private equity.
He said he wants Percolate to be the biggest ad software company. Part of his plan: to help brands manage social in a new way, by tracking the creation of content and cataloging all elements in posts, from the images used to fonts that worked best.
“We use all that data to start to understand what posts perform better,” he said.
Meanwhile, U.K.-based Brandwatch recently partnered with Gnip.
“It’s boom times for data and marketing,” said Brandwatch CMO Will McInnes. “Agencies and brands want to benchmark the performance of their content marketing and understand when content is distributed virally.”