Content optimizing platform RAMP is getting social, or at least it's looking to help its publishers take advantage of the huge search numbers Facebook is putting up to connect viewers to its clients' content. The company is rolling out its Social Publishing Framework "RAMP SPF," that will allow publishers to harness the increasing influence of social media to drive higher page views and monetization of content through recommendations and discovery on social networks.
"Sometimes timing work in your favor when you’re building a product," Tom Wilde, RAMP's CEO, told FierceOnlineVideo. "We stared building this late last year and throughout Q1 there’s just been a series of press releases and analysts reports talking about the growth of Facebook as a source of referrals."
Until recently, Facebook's growth was, at best, seen as a consumer phenomenon. But it's become a power as the next big referral source, in some cases rivaling Google as the next biggest traffic driver.
"Creating community around content has become absolutely critical," said Jessica Schell, SVP Strategy for NBC Universal. "RAMP now offers a simple tool that will enable our properties to further leverage the Facebook audience to drive engagement and to build online audience."
Internet research company Hitwise recently reported that for the first time Facebook has more total visits than Google. Correspondingly, many large publishers and broadcasters are witnessing more site referrals from Facebook and the effects of social networking than organic search engine traffic from Google and other search engines.
"The importance of social networks and social media sites to major content publishing has just reached the tipping point, and RAMP SPF is the most suitable solution for harnessing the power of these platforms for major publishers' audience development and content monetization objectives," said Wilde.
"What we’ve done is built a turnkey way to weave in the Facebook publisher APIs throughout your site, so that this is more than just Facebook Connect, it’s actually the publisher APIs, you get their benefits and features," said Wilde. "RAMP Content Optimization platform is the most comprehensive and flexible solution for dynamic web publishing, and adding RAMP SPF to this platform demonstrates how we empower major content publishers stay on top of the fast evolving landscape of web publishing.
"I think anybody who is trying to create community around content will be a customer for this," added Wilde. "With SEO you have kind of a one shot referral, not as much of a continuous community being built. This has more of an annuity effect, which is why I think Facebook has become so interesting to publishers."
In fact, he said RAMP has some three dozen customers interested in RAMP SPF. "They understand SEO," he said. "And they all get it when you talk to them about social, they just haven't jumped on it yet." Wilde said the provisioning to customers has been straight forward "because we’ve done the work to make the platform highly scalable and flexible."
For more:
- see this release
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