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How you helped Smartbrief innovate

3 min read

By Mary Ellen Slayter 05/26/16

Brands & Campaigns

This post is from SmartBrief’s launch manager, Sarah Brown. Sarah’s role at SmartBrief is to launch new publications throughout the year and bring innovations to our more than 2 million subscribers.

Readers of SmartBrief on Social Media (or this blog) may not know this, but SmartBrief publishes more than 100 e-mail newsletters across a variety of industries. We partner with trade associations, nonprofits, and corporations to find news suited to the needs of their membership and industry at large (See a full list of our newsletters.) Often, we’ll roll out innovations in SmartBrief on Social Media, and test them there before bringing them to the SmartBrief readership at large.

Over the past few weeks, I worked to do just that with the “social-share” buttons, which our intrepid SmartBrief on Social Media readers have been helping us fine-tune since January. As you know, these buttons allow readers to share SmartBrief summaries with their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter networks.

What do these buttons mean for SmartBrief and our trade association partners? A whole lot. Starting with:

  • Viral Growth. Having the ability to tap into the networks of our readers and enable them to spread the word about SmartBrief will only mean great things for our products.
  • Branding. SmartBrief and our trade association partners are featured prominently whenever readers share story summaries.
  • Engagement. Even though we just launched these buttons, readers are already clicking away on them, engaging them further with our content. This makes for happy readers, and off the charts engagement numbers for SmartBrief.
  • Bragging rights. SmartBrief and our association partners can — rightly so — brag about this latest innovation. Our developers did a wonderful job on the backend of this functionality and SmartBrief on Social Media readers proved an excellent audience to launch with. All this to meet the needs of our readers.

We rolled out the social-share buttons on Wednesday, April 22, to more than 1 million of our newsletter subscribers, with more on the way in the coming weeks.

Preliminary results:

  • During the week since launch, SmartBriefreaders directly tweeted summaries from SmartBrief newsletters more than 1,500 times.
  • SmartBrief saw traffic from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn jump. And the vast majority of folks coming to our site from those networks are new visitors who have never been to SmartBrief.com before.
  • Many of our subscribers are relatively new to social networking, and SmartBrief share buttons are giving them a way to engage as they never have before. We have only anecdotal evidence, but it seems that several of the people tweeting our summaries are brand-new to Twitter — with SmartBrief summaries serving as one of their first tweets!

A couple of our favorite tweets from SmartBrief readers:

I’m so happy for the positive feedback — but most of all, I’m happy that folks are using the buttons, which will translate to new eyeballs for our newsletters. Thanks to SmartBrief on Social Media readers for helping us fine tune this innovation.