PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ShareThis, a social data platform trusted by over 4.5M domains, is announcing today at Facebook's F8 event the availability of headline testing for publishers within Instant Articles. Social A/B gives Instant Articles’ publishers the ability to quickly and easily test multiple headlines with their Facebook audience as part of their existing editorial workflow, with the goal of driving more impressions, clicks, and ultimately, shares. Last year, Facebook passed Google as the largest referrer of traffic on the internet (Parse.ly 2015), and with the launch of Instant Articles, publishers have a new, compelling platform to grow their audience both on Facebook and their site.
The recent influence social has had on publisher traffic has surpassed that of most other audience growth sources, increasing the importance and power of a compelling headline. The earned media virality of headlines that captures the attention of not just your readers but their Facebook friends as well is becoming the fastest and most efficient way to grow traffic and increase engagement. Selecting the best headline, once an editorial art, has now become part science as well with this new statistical approach.
Social A/B for Instant Articles takes the guesswork out of selecting the best headline by letting your readers and their friends decide what headline is more appealing, clickable, and shareable. Editors can create multiple headline options as part of their existing content creation workflow and then allow the Social A/B tool to test each Instant Articles headline with the publisher's Facebook audience. ShareThis uses a proprietary algorithm for the Social A/B headline testing tool that converges on the best headline in the shortest amount of time to then automatically select and publish the winning headline that is driving the most clicks and shares within Instant Articles.
USA TODAY’s For The Win, a publisher within the ShareThis network, was a beta tester of the Social A/B product. Matt Harvey, USA TODAY'S Senior Product Director says, "Before using Social A/B, our editors would spend too much time trying to pick the best headlines for their stories. This was inefficient and not always effective. Now, they can run multiple headlines on every story and allow Social A/B to pick the best one based on data, not just intuition. This automated social optimization drives up to 150% more engagement on popular content, directly impacting our audience and revenue goals.”
ShareThis built Social A/B for Instant Articles with a plugin that seamlessly integrates into the publisher's CMS system for Instant Article publishing. Additionally, ShareThis is integrated with Instant Articles API to collect the vital click and share data needed to determine the best, most effective headline quickly. The product provides a unique set of features that publishers can leverage to make Instant Articles even more successful:
- Automatic Optimization: Headlines are automatically updated within Instant Articles and your site based on what your readers love, click, and share.
- Instant Growth: Traffic will quickly increase by simply testing a few headlines and effortlessly optimizing content across platforms.
- Easy Integration: Social A/B for Instant Articles integrates seamlessly into your editorial workflow.
"ShareThis has been helping publishers grow their audience with social sharing tools for over six years now, driving billions of social shares and clicks every month to our publisher network. We are excited to be extending our social sharing platform into the realm of headline testing with Facebook Instant Articles," says Paul Lentz, SVP Publisher & Business Operations. "Our publishers have been telling us they need new ways to leverage their social audience, so extending A/B headline testing off their site and onto social networks was a logical next step for our publisher products." ShareThis is making Social A/B for Instant Articles available immediately in a controlled release here: http://www.sharethis.com/instantarticles.
About ShareThis
ShareThis is a social data platform with real-time processing at its core. ShareThis believes the desire to share is rooted deep within human beings, reflecting passions, wants, and lifestyles that are constantly fluctuating throughout the day, week, and month. By identifying and understanding these human sentiments, ShareThis powers a more personal and relevant internet experience. The ShareThis consumer engagement and sharing tools are used by over 4.5 million domains to drive engagement, traffic, and personalization, capturing the widest and deepest sentiments of people across the internet. These sentiments flow into the ShareThis platform as terabytes of data that are processed in real time to better understand people, making social data actionable for any business that requires a holistic view of people or customers. This understanding powers the ShareThis Real-Time Marketing (RTM) Engine, which targets constantly changing audience interests and is the solution of choice for some of the world’s largest brands to activate audiences across all screens and digital ad formats. ShareThis is privately held and headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. To learn more, please visit www.sharethis.com.
