Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) June 3 said it has purchased PostRank, a startup whose software sifts through social media to disambiguate signal from noise.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
ReadWriteWeb, which uses PostRank, explained that users may plug in any RSS feed to PostRank, which scores each post in that feed by the number of comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter, saves on Delicious and other social media metrics. Users may then set up a filtered feed of the most-discussed items.
Publishers pay for PostRank’s data services and analytics to get a handle on not only where their content is being used and by whom, but what’s being said about their rivals. Companies such as Jive Software and Salesforce.com provide similar filtering services at a much more serious level for larger enterprises.
“Conversations online are an important signal for advertisers, publishers, developers and consumers—but today’s tools only skim the surface of what we think is possible,” wrote PostRank CEO Carol Leaman and CTO Ilya Grigorik in a blog post.
Strategies to build content interaction on social networks
Yesterday PostRank released the results of research they performed on the frequency with which press releases that originate on commercial newswire web sites are shared in social networks. PostRank found press releases on PR Newswire’s web site were shared much more frequently than content posted to our competitors’ sites. The study counted the number of times press releases were shared on 20+ social networks. (Read the full PostRank study.)
Summary of PostRank press release sharing study results:
We’ve known for a while the audience we’ve cultivated on PR Newswire.com is more likely to share content than the average internet user. A study of PRNewswire.com users we commissioned Forrester Research to perform revealed that despite the diversity of the PR Newswire audience (it’s comprised of professional journalists, bloggers, individual investors, and consumers researching products and services) they share a common trait – they’re more likely to share the content they consume than the average U.S. internet user.
(More details on information consumption on PR Newswire.com by different user groups: journalists & bloggers, individual investors & consumers.)
However, we were honestly surprised by the fact that press releases posted to PR Newswire.com are shared much more frequently than those found on competitor sites. Why is this the case? Well, in addition to cultivating a quality audience, several other tactics we’ve employed have helped boost the sharing of PR Newswire content. And we think these lessons we’ve learned from running a news site are useful for anyone developing a content strategy:
