How social affinity can up your ad game

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AffinityAnswers is building ‘act like a’ models for the social space, analyzing actions over more than 60,000 active social accounts, scoring cookies and device IDs to provide strong-performing programmatic audiences to marketers.

Kristina: Lots of marketers use social actions such as Facebook “likes” as a show of interest in brands. How does social “affinity” differ?

Sree Nagarajan, CEO, AffinityAnswers: Social affinity is designed to predict and quantify audiences that are in the ‘pre-intent’ phase – that place in the consumer journey between when they become aware of the brand, and when they actually convert or make a purchase. Therefore, purchase intent is usually the ‘sweet spot’ where brands can expect the biggest lift.

Kristina: How does social engagement come to represent a branding metric?

Sree: Translating social engagement from photo posts and content likes to something quantifiable and actionable is no easy task. Our proprietary scoring engine and algorithm examines a number of factors – recency and frequency of the activity, the type of activity, sentiment – to produce a single score that quantifies the relationship between one brand and another. Although it measures that one relationship, each score is taking in the scope of all of the relationships that consumers may have on social, across 60,000 different brands, TV shows, Internet personalities, YouTube channels and more.

Kristina: Why does social affinity matter?

Sree: Social affinity matters for a couple of reasons, mostly because of the quantification of ‘pre-intent’ audiences that we mentioned earlier. Secondly, it can provide valuable insights about the brands’ audiences. For example, social affinity between the new Seth MacFarlane show The Orville and e-retailer Stylin Online has grown 9% in the last four weeks. This is valuable information for both FOX and Stylin Online that can be used in developing consumer profiles and contributing to strategy and tactics in future campaigns.

Kristina: What is the next step for social affinity?

Sree: The predictive nature of social affinity makes it a natural candidate to link to all different kinds of business outcomes. Via our programmatic audiences, we have seen social affinity-based targeting perform well in boosting video completion rates and purchase intent. The next step would be showing how growth in social affinity boost sales; for example, does increased social engagement for a new TV show result in increased viewership, or does a boost in social affinity for a travel spot mean increased tourism? These are the questions that will allow marketers to take social affinity to the next level.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Knight-1
Kristina Knight, Journalist , BA
Content Writer & Editor
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Kristina Knight is a freelance writer with more than 15 years of experience writing on varied topics. Kristina’s focus for the past 10 years has been the small business, online marketing, and banking sectors, however, she keeps things interesting by writing about her experiences as an adoptive mom, parenting, and education issues. Kristina’s work has appeared with BizReport.com, NBC News, Soaps.com, DisasterNewsNetwork, and many more publications.