Go, go Markerly socialpaste!

A client introduced us to Markerly earlier this week (thanks, Mike!), and – after doing some due diligence – we decided to give it a spin on our site.

So, what does Markerly do?

According to their website, they’re the future of content marketing, but – hey – who isn’t these days? What they do is allow your site visitors to share content from your site more easily.

Every time someone highlights words on velocitypartners.com (if you’re going to cut and paste, for example), a little widget appears with an “M” and some social sharing icons. Click one of the social sharing icons and it auto-populates a status update with the text highlighted as a quote, and a link that goes straight to the bit you highlighted.

It’s that easy. Try it on this sentence, for example: “Once again lured into giving away a social share, dammit!”

Nifty, huh? Even if it’s a slick little doodad, they’ve given it the tech messiah treatment – “proprietary algorithm”, “actionable data”, “user management platform”, “personalize experiences”, “retarget social influencers” and “hyper-targeted”. Just so you know: They’re ambitious.

Thousands of websites are using Markerly, apparently (among them, the KISSMetrics blog). And, interestingly, many sites that review them, also use them. Markerly says that the tech increases shares, and offers an analytics dashboard to back it up. We’ll update this post with our own experiences.

Our developer buddies are more sceptical. Thomas noted that it didn’t stop you from trying to share far more text than a tweet allows, and that it didn’t work for mobile. Dom got more touchy-feely on it:
“Personally I think it’s a little bit ‘pushy’. A bit like a marketer over my shoulder saying “share-this, share-that”.”
I reminded him that we’re marketers (from over his shoulder), so we’re gonna try the thing. But, at the same time, I had to agree the man may have a point.

So we’re asking you to tell us what you think (Note: We do not work with Markerly in any way whatsoever, so these questions are purely for curiosity’s sake):