• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, December 13, 2011

The advent of new Facebook analytics and programming tools, especially Insights and related APIs, is enabling marketers and technology providers to automate many aspects of social media marketing that were previously labor-intensive to the point of being prohibitive or just depressing. In one recent example, LA-based startup CitizenNet has launched an “Automatic Social Promote” service which integrates Facebook’s Insights API and Ads API, allowing marketers to automatically identify and propagate their most engaging social content on Facebook.

One of the first clients to use CitizenNet’s automatic social promotion service is Sony Pictures’ theatrical marketing division, which deployed the tools on behalf of “The Vow,” a romantic tearjerker starring Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum, playing a musician who must re-win his wife’s heart after she suffers memory loss in a car accident.

As most readers will have already surmised, “The Vow” is a chick flick, but that term is imprecise at best: there are many different kind of chicks, demographically and psychographically speaking, each of whom probably ought to be addressed in a different way for optimal marketing effect.

To refine the movie’s Facebook ad targeting, CitizenNet’s automatic social promotion tools analyzed a constellation of engagement metrics around two of the most popular posts on the movie’s Facebook page, which produced similar high levels of engagement but with two different stills -- one with Tatum looking all stoic and hunky in the rain, and another with Tatum looking all stoic and hunky in bed.

Using language processing and semantic analysis of Facebook’s anonymized and aggregated data about people interacting with the page, the CitizenNet social promotion service determined that the “rain” post resonated most with women ages 18-30 who are into pop music, while the “bed” post resonated with women ages 25-35 who are into country music. This, in turn, allowed Sony to target Sponsored Stories based on the posts to an even larger audience with the same demographic and psychographic features. The process is repeated automatically each time Sony's social team posts to the page.

Automatic Social Promote should help cut down time spent on “the traditional advertising portion of the whole marketing mix, by automating the boosting of social content,” according to Citizennet founder Dan Benyamin, who says automation can free up marketers to focus more on the creative side of their social media efforts. Benyamin added that he hoped the tool will be adopted by both traditional agencies and digital agencies, as well as internally by in-house marketing operations.