Helsinki seems to have two major trends going at the moment. Gaming companies, and startups like Kiosked and Publishzer that are adding interactivity and engagement to images. But with this movement is ThingLink, a startup that adds interactivity to images to drive more engagement. Founded in 2010, they now boast over 130,000 publishers using the platform, including a number of giant newspaper and web publishing properties.
Now when publishers share ThingLinked images to Facebook, they’re able the offer the same image tagging functionality right in the Facebook newsfeed. Uses need to click the images first to get the tags to pop up, but now publishers can drive Facebook users to more text information, videos, or links.
Rich media tags from services like Youtube, Vimeo, Instagram, Imgur, Flickr, and Twitter are supported from the beginning, and support for custom third-party tags will be added in the coming weeks.
They’ve been testing this Facebook integration with organizations like Mèdecins Sans Frontiérs, and CEO Ulla Engeström says that the preliminary results are fascinating.
“They show that interactive images posted on FB timeline perform significantly better than on the original website. In both lifestyle and editorial images, their CTR seem to be 5-10x higher inside Facebook. We will get more data in the coming weeks but initially it looks like interactive images on Facebook Timeline work great.”
ThingLink monetizes through its Premium Business services allows the ability to create and launch custom image apps, and features that give you more enterprise features like group account management and more metrics tracking.
ThingLink also offers a similar integration on Twitter, where brands and publishers have found it a useful tool. But Engestrom tells us, “Our service has been built from the beginning to target multiple platforms: Web was the first – Facebook is the second.”
