Huffington Post is now a “social media company”

by @gordonmacmillan, posted on 1 July, 2010 at 8:32 am, filed under Facebook, Media Owners, Social Media, Social Networking and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

The Huffington Post, the one time liberal blog and now something more akin to an online newspaper, says it is positioning itself now as a social-media company.

In an interview in Ad Age Greg Coleman, president and chief revenue officer at the Huffington Post, said that positioning meant using all those powerful social media tools that had helped get the site to 24 million monthly uniques to help advertisers push their messages out across the web.

“So whether it’s tapping into our Facebook Connect, tapping into our partnership with Twitter, our SEO, that’s really our point of differentiation, and I’m hiring a number of people that we’re calling ‘social marketing managers’ that will, literally, project manage those tools for marketers.

“So we’re doing that, and then of course, we’re open for regular advertising, so we position ourselves as a fast-growing, high-income, high-education, highly opinionated audience with scale, and that’s gotten a tremendous amount of recognition within the marketing community.”

The Huffington Post, founded by Arianna Huffington, was one of a number of blogs that launched five years ago that have gone on to become web giants, but its star in particular has outshone that of rivals. It now pulls in more traffic than The New York Times and covers 20 vertical markets from music to students with a travel vertical on the way.

Coleman gave examples of the kind of social advertising that the Huffington Post is offering to advertisers citing a project it did with General Electric based on health and well being. The campaign allowed the firm to have its ads featured on any articles tagged with the word wellness. It also created a share tool that ensured when those articles were shared the GE ad unit was also shared.

“We’re trying to come up with the real metrics, but we believe that the reach of the campaign is far greater off of our site, as a result of the social tools on our site.”

Coleman would not comment on rumours concerning wanted to buy the Huffington Post, but he did say that the site currently racks up almost 3 million comments per month and is projecting it will hit 5 million comments a month within the 18 months.