Link
http://www.tapinfluence.com
Specifications
TapInfluence is content marketing software that helps users identify and engage with social media content creators as well as create, manage, aggregate, publish, distribute, and measure content. Influencer searches can be conducted around more than 35 criteria, including topic, reach, geography, education, language, and gender. Influencer content can be published instantly to branded properties, including social media channels. Real-time metrics include content reach, views, engagement, and overall total media value.
Cost
Software licensing ranges from $3,000 to $10,000 per month depending on number of seats, concurrent programs, and number of content creators. Professional services, such as consulting and custom API integration, are available for an additional cost.
User
Jessica Padula, associate manager of social media for White Wave’s Silk and Horizon Organic brands, has been using TapInfluence since January 2013.
How do you use it?
When you log on, there’s a list of all active and archived programs you have done. You can click into any program, and there are various tabs for things you might want to do.
To set up a program, you start with an assignment detail, which is the brief for influencers. It’s a really clear system that lets you upload documents you want to send to bloggers to give them guidelines and guidance about what they’re going to be posting for the assignment.
A calendar tab lets you set up individual dates for bloggers to post. If you have 10 bloggers you can pick time slots and schedule the bloggers into them. You can also indicate that you want a given number of posts on a certain day, and bloggers can come into the calendar and pick when they want to post.
A search tab lets you search the entire database of influencers who have signed up in TapInfluence’s system. You can search by name or niche and sort by total reach or unique monthly blog views.
The archived programs section is really helpful. Once a blogger has written about an assignment there’s a content tab with links to all the blog and social media posts that particular blogger has made. It’s incredibly time saving.
An analytics tab shows all of the results for your campaign, including the number of blog posts created, the amount of Facebook shares, and how everything translates in terms of media values.
We go to our dedicated account manager for everything. We’ve worked with other vendors that have different contacts for several things, and it’s been really great to have just one account manager. If we have a question or need something and she doesn’t know the answer, she will find the answer for us – usually within a couple of hours.
How does it serve your business needs?
We love TapInfluence because influencer marketing is incredibly valuable for our brands. We’ve always gotten really strong results from influencer marketing in general.
In working with TapInfluence over the past year, we’ve evolved how we approach influencer marketing. We used to do individual programs for brands.
For example, when a new product launched we’d tell bloggers what to write about. Now we’re implementing an always-on blogger strategy. We’re still giving guidelines to bloggers, but we’re also giving them freedom to figure out where our brands fit into their lives and their blogs, and that ultimately translates into what most interests their readers. This approach grew out of our partnership with TapInfluence.
From a business standpoint, it’s helped us become much more efficient. Last year, our Silk brand had a smaller blogger program that was not run through TapInfluence. We have limited team resources and there are only so many bloggers you can have one-on-one relationships with.
TapInfluence has allowed us to be so much more efficient in finding and reaching influencers and in reporting on our influencer programs.
It also helps us calculate overall return versus just one original share. For example, we did a program last year for our International Delight brand in which one blogger wrote a smoothie recipe for the brand. It was a great piece of content that the brand team shared through social media channels, and TapInfluence analytics showed all related content generated.
That one recipe blog post got than 20,000 pins on Pinterest. The earned media value of that is incredibly strong. Without TapInfluence, we might not have found that metric.
How does it integrate with your existing infrastructure from an IT standpoint?
It’s all Web-based.
What are the main benefits?
Efficiency. We’re now looking at blogger programs that will include 30 or 40 or more bloggers on an ongoing basis. As one person who manages two brands it would be impossible to keep up with that volume without TapInfluence.
It’s helped us evolve our influencer strategy and how we approach things. TapInfluence is dedicated not just to evolving their own system, but also to helping clients evolve in terms of how they approach this type of marketing.
What would you like to see improved/added?
Right now, we’re working with our account manager on a few improvements in terms of evaluating how assignments are done that served our new always-on approach.
TapInfluence has really evolved the earned media calculation over the past year. We needed something to prove the value of our campaigns from a dollar standpoint. TapInfluence worked with us to put it into the system and give it the flexibility we need to align data points and get an earned media value that equates across channels.
Competitors
NewsCred: content marketing software that includes planning, creation, and publishing tools, as well as analytics.
Contently: provides content marketing software for publishers and personal branding and more.
