Startup studio Science Inc. is announcing its latest project — Refame, a marketing platform for social apps Vine and Instagram.
Science’s approach to startups is pretty diverse — it launches new companies, invests in others, and also acquires teams and products. In this case, it’s launching Refame as part of Science Growth Labs, the organization’s division for customer acquisition and marketing, with a particular focus on reaching millennials.
Refame is building up a network of users who are influential on Vine and Instagram, and it says it has developed an algorithm which determines which users will help a specific advertiser increase brand awareness and grow their audience among their target demographic. It then connects both sides so they can create custom social video campaigns, and it offers analytics to track the success of those campaigns.
This isn’t the first time Science has gotten involved in marketing on social media. Last year, it took its existing Pinterest analytics engine and launched a full-fledged Pinterest marketing agency and software suite called HelloSociety.
And by the way, Science isn’t the only company that sees big potential in Vine and Instagram marketing, either — another startup, Niche, seems to be doing something similar.
This is one of those “launches” that comes after the company has been running live campaigns with clients and now feels confident enough to make a bigger splash. It wasn’t, however, willing to share sample campaigns, because it said its client list is currently confidential. Refame did say that its Vine content has been viewed 100 million times in the past four weeks, and that the campaigns reached 80 million people total. (The company gave me with the numbers a couple of weeks ago, so they might be a little out of date.)