Stipple Monetizes Images In Facebook

Air-Jordan-shoes-B_1Stipple released a Facebook feature Wednesday that allows brands to attach image tags in photos aimed at driving engagement and purchases through content in the newsfeed.

Brands testing the tool on Facebook include People, Karmaloop and Super Bowl-bound San Francisco 49er Chris Culliver.

Similar to search engine Bing's landing home page, the tags provide additional information about the image. The link can provide a path to landing pages off the Facebook site, such as a video on YouTube, Twitter feeds or a click-through to another site to make a purchase.

Research firm eMarketer expects Facebook advertising will reach $7.2 billion in 2013, up from more than $4 billion in the U.S. in 2012. Stipple aims to help brands capture additional revenue through click-throughs to landing pages or ecommerce sites.

The feature follows integration with Twitter, which allows brands to connect with its 200 million monthly active users. Brands like Sony Pictures and Nordstrom have begun to see 50% engagement rates on interactive images, according to Stipple.

The percentage represents consumers who have interacted with the images by hovering over them to reveal the information, not necessarily clicking on the image. Consumers can explore the content without clicking. Many will hover over a photo instinctively.

Consumers can hover over an image to see a song name or price, but click through to buy or play. Those who are interested click through. This behavior has been true of images on Web sites, publishers and Twitter, so we also expect the same for Facebook, said Stipple CEO and Founder Rey Flemings.

Brands can share pre-Stipple'd images on Facebook, but cannot make changes to other photos on the social site. Alterations made to one tagged image changes for all identical images that appear across social and brand sites in real-time. For example, when a product price changes in a Stipple'd image, or if an artist has a song embedded and changes it to their newest single, the information in that specific tag changes in all photos across the Web.

Flemings said the company plans to look into optimization tactics for tags in Graph Search on Facebook.

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