NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. and MONTREAL, Nov. 5, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Engagement Labs Inc. (TSX VENTURE: EL) (OTCQB: ELBSF) today announced a major development in its TotalSocial® platform with the release of Version 3.2 which enables marketers to predict movements in their brand equity metrics months in advance, taking advantage of the predictive power of consumer conversations on long term brand equity. This is a first-of-its-kind capability that quantifies the relationship of conversations, both offline and online, with long-term business results and provides strategic guidance on how to drive performance improvement.
“We have already proven the unique ability of our TotalSocial data platform to predict sales trends up to eight weeks in advance. Now we can go further to give marketers a tool to help them build long-term brand value through social performance,” said Ed Keller, CEO of Engagement Labs. “Half of the business impact comes from offline conversations, and half from social media. This combination, which Engagement Labs uniquely measures, is central to our unique selling proposition.”
In addition to predicting brand equity, TotalSocial has expanded media coverage by including all consumer brand conversations that occur on the Reddit platform, and adding YouTube video shares to its brand sharing metric. Reddit is a platform that attracted 44 million mentions of leading US brands in the first half of 2018, adding substantially to the scope of online conversation coverage in the US.
The TotalSocial product has four online and four offline social metrics, including online and offline “brand sharing” associated with the frequency with which a brand’s marketing content is talked about face-to-face or shared online. With the addition of YouTube video shares, brands will be able to monitor their performance relative to competitors in producing online video content that consumers want to share with each other. In the first half of 2018, consumers shared videos from leading US brands 15 million times.
Besides the US, Engagement Labs presently monitors conversations about client brands in 10 other countries where Reddit and YouTube data are available.
Engagement Labs also enhanced the power of time series analysis in its Diagnostics module by increasing the speed with which analysts can pinpoint the causes of recent changes in TotalSocial performance. If a brand sees a major uptick in conversation in Q2 2018 versus a year earlier, the tools will identify which demographic groups, social media platforms, and traditional media channels that are responsible for the improvement.
“The new version of TotalSocial delivers on our promise to continually improve the marketers’ ability to raise their revenues by tapping the power of social influence. No other data source provides such a comprehensive system for leveraging the entire social ecosystem,” Mr. Keller said.
In May 2018, the company announced new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools to enable clients to more quickly and accurately plan growth strategies based on unique social data and analytics. This release extends those capabilities further.
The TotalSocial platform continues to lead the market, adding AI and machine learning to an impressive list of firsts—including being the first and only platform to combine online and offline data, and the first and only with predictive analytics. The TotalSocial platform was awarded the “Best Practitioner Paper of 2017” by the Advertising Research Foundation and was lauded for its innovation regarding its approach towards data and analytics in the social ecosystem.