MobSoc Media: Content Marketing Loves Native Advertising

by Barb Mosher Zinck | May 28, 2014 12:00 pm

I think for many, the jury is still out on native advertising. But MobSoc Media may have found a way to make it possible through very specific targeting and a strong focus on social and mobile.

I spoke with MobSoc Media’s CEO, Steve Wick, about what the company is doing and how it works, and it is pretty interesting. MobSoc Media is essentially a publishing network: it has 41 digital properties across four verticals: entertainment, technology, lifestyle and sports. If you are a celebrity junkie, you probably know one of them: Celebrity Bistro.

These media properties are a combination of curated news across the Internet, custom content and sponsored articles. MobSoc Media works with brands across the spectrum of its digital properties to develop custom branded advertising content. This content is clearly marked “Partner” to distinguish it from the other content.

 

To go along with each responsive-design website, each digital properties has its own Facebook page, Twitter account, and mobile site. In fact, there’s a really strong focus on Facebook for these digital properties (Celebrity Bistro has over 4.1 million members).  Much of the traffic on the websites comes from the Facebook posts, Wick said that Facebook delivers engagement rates/click rates of +3%.

Wick believes they have the right formula: in-stream content provides much higher engagement rates than display ads in Facebook (we’ve seen a few reports that point this out), in-stream content works on any channel well and when you get to the actual website, the content is optimized for search engines – so you’re getting the best of everything. He did say that the website content didn’t matter as much as the Facebook traffic, it’s the social graph that’s key to the high engagement rates.

MobSoc Media also has a very useful tool to help it curate the best content to present on its digital properties. It’s call Social Rank, and it’s a proprietary algorithm that leverages the collective intelligence of the crowds. Want to know what trending right now across the Internet? Maybe you’re only interested in Facebook, or the Web alone – social rank will tell you. Each website offers both trending and breaking news for the type of content it publishes.

Do people have a problem with advertorial content on Facebook? In all the testing they did, Wick said they didn’t receive negative feedback. He believes this is because they are presenting the right content in the right context. He also noted that whether the content is sponsored or not, the engagement rates are the same. Brands find out how their content is performing through Google Analytics (for the website) and Facebook Campaign Analytics.

MobSoc Media is doing all the right things – it’s presenting brand sponsored content within very specific contexts, clearly marked according to IAB guidelines, with a strong focus on social, especially Facebook. It’s also being presented within a mix of highly trending content across the Internet. It’s only been available since January of this year, and it will be interesting to see where it’s at by the end of this year.

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Source URL: https://digitaltechdiary.com/mobsoc-media-content-marketing-loves-native-advertising/803/

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