Demonstrating that social advertising works if you pick the right social media environment, Cie Studios introduces PostRelease, a new and highly effective solution for advertising in online forums.

The product enables companies to insert posts that contain relevant content into targeted online forum discussions. Using the automated system, marketers identify pertinent forum discussions and insert messages as posts that contain useful content to be absorbed by the community.

The approach is automated but audited – all posts are reviewed to ensure the content is relevant to the discussion topic. It is this quality control that sets PostRelease apart from banner and text ads: in its year-long beta, PostRelease click-through rates averaged 33 percent, with highs reaching nearly 90 percent.

Key to Forum Advertising: Relevance

Product conversations are often a consumer’s only reason for being in a forum in the first place. But until now, there hasn’t been an easy way for advertisers to be a part of the forum conversation, as PostRelease is. The approach works: PostRelease click-through rates average 33 percent, while banner ads typically average click-through rates of less than 1%, according to MarketingSherpa.

One challenge for forums is that some advertisers pose as users simply to insert “disguised” commercial messages. Forum owners spend considerable time keeping such posts out. PostRelease, by contrast, creates a structured environment for inserting content that is useful and relevant, and introduces transparency, clearly identifying its messages.

PostRelease posts can include text, pictures, hyperlinks and links to video. The posts are clearly marked as from PostRelease, and they remain in the lead position (toward the top of the post list page) of selected forum discussion categories for seven days. Once released from the top position, the post remains part of the forum discussion. These posts are archived as forum content, so they continue to generate responses long after a campaign ends.