ShareThis is thrilled to let the world know about the results from our first advertising campaign using ShareThis Influence, a segmentation methodology which helps advertisers and publishers reach and identify social influencers. Along with our partner Empower MediaMarketing, we helped run a display advertising campaign for their client, scar management brand Mederma, which was aimed at tapping into influence as an alternative to search and contextual display. Not only did we see the invaluable and direct benefits of sharing on the Web, but were blown away by the results and we think you will be too.

Here’s why: 

In previous months, Mederma launched a similar campaign utilizing both search and display advertising to reach and engage with consumers, and encourage the download of a coupon for the product. Through search ads, 1-in-4 people in that campaign clicked to redeem the coupon, compared to 1-in-10 from contextual display. In our campaign using ShareThis Influence segments, 50 percent of people who clicked through to the coupon showed intent to redeem. We also saw that “Influencers” (people who shared often) were 7x more likely to click to view the coupon, and the affected (people who reacted to the shared information) were 1.6 times more likely, compared to the previous campaigns.

But what does it all mean?

We think this is the start of something huge. The results speak volumes to the importance of sharing.  It’s not just the center of the social web for consumers, but it is massively important for advertisers and publishers too. The results show that sharing helps identify and reach highly-engaged audiences, and that sharing can outperform search and redefines what’s possible with display advertising. Tapping into the power of influence works, and sharing is the foundation of this scalable social behavior on the Web.

So, What’s Next?

We are going to do more – lots more. This was one of our early tests with our influence segments that were accumulated from reaching 400 million consumers per month across the 135,000 sites that use ShareThis, and analyzing millions of social topics a month. And we’re just starting to skim the surface with publishers, too. We’re now helping our publishers in closed beta to create their own influence segments and monetize them with their own advertisers.

Looking ahead we hope to use ShareThis Influence to continue to connect brands with influencers and redefine the industry’s idea of social audiences. It’s an exciting time for us, opening another chapter in our company’s history, and we couldn’t be more pleased with it.

(For more information, come hear Jim Price of Empower present the findings at ad:tech or grab the case study PDF)

Tim Schigel
@schigel