• by Jim Anderson , May 2, 2014

This week, Sprinklr announcedboth its $40 million raise and its intent to get into the paid social media arena. It is a welcome validation in the rapidly growing marketplace that my company, SocialFlow, also occupies. 

As social media audiences continue to swell, brands need to invest more to grab targeted consumer attention. Organic reach on Facebook is no longer a given. And with every bell and whistle Twitter adds, it’s harder for companies to stand out.

Attention is a currency that now comes at a premium.

Sprinklr’s CEO Ragy Thomas says, “Paid social media is at the core of creating brand experiences.”  We believe that Owned Media posts (aka, organic posts) are still at the core of an effective social strategy, even given the challenges that many marketers are facing with the decline in organic engagement (widely reported here and here), the smartest social strategies integrate owned media with paid media.

What’s the best way to do that? The first step is to start optimizing posts instead of scheduling them so that the right message is delivered at the right time—when audiences are ready to engage with the content. The fact is that no human social media manager can possibly analyze all the data to determine when a post is most likely to engage readers. But an algorithm can.

Publishers were the first to catch on to this truth. And the results continue to prove that data can drive engagement better than guesswork can.

Full disclosure: SocialFlow has built a whole business on this premise, so we can attest to the effectiveness of the approach—we see it working every day. To wit: One of our clients, a large publisher, scheduled 168 posts during the month of March. Then they optimized a further 2,050 posts. The results, in terms of clicks/engagements: Optimized posts resulted in more than 1.2 million additional engagements (mostly clicks back to the Web site) in that month alone.

Detailed analysis reveals that optimized posts received twice the engagement on a per-post basis.  Show me a brand running a campaign aimed at driving consumers to a commerce site’s landing page, and I’ll show you a brand that would welcome twice the clicks.

So let’s extend this exercise to brands.  Take a brand with several hundred thousand fans/followers across Facebook and Twitter. Now, it’s virtually impossible for the keepers of that brand to predict when a post will perform well, based only on the time of day they’re scheduled to publish. (Never mind which post will perform well at any given time.) An algorithm that optimizes your messages can routinely deliver two times the engagement level as messages that are not optimized.

And this is where the importance of integrating Owned and Paid come into play. 

Once you have started optimizing posts, you’ll be able to capitalize on messages that perform well by amplifying them—putting paid media behind them—in real time. By focusing your paid dollars on your highest-performing owned posts, you can maximize returns—we’ve seen 5% or higher on click-through rates for a paid spend.

The shift in social will require departments that previously operated independently to collaborate. The currency of attention will only become more effective when brands and agencies can break down some of those silos and bring together the worlds of paid and owned content. The rewards will go to marketers who see this as an opportunity and act accordingly.