• TextualAds Brings SMS Marketing To Facebook Fans

    Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More

    Brands and businesses are increasingly setting up Facebook Fan pages, which acts as their social homepage on Facebook where they can interact with customers and hopefully find new ones. These Fan pages can be customized with all sorts of tabs and apps. A new app launching today called TextualAds, in the same space as Textopoly, lets marketers ask for their fans’ phone numbers and send them targeted text-messages.

    It is SMS marketing meets Facebook. TextualAds may be the first app to use Facebook profile and demographic data to target SMS ads. The SMS messages can be targeted to fans (who opt-in) based on their age, gender, country, city, or exact geo-location. A nightclub or bar could send out free drinks coupons to women under 30, for instance, who are fans of that bar. Or It could send an SMS message to any fan who happens to be walking in the vicinity. A spa having a slow weekend could entice women customers to “Bring in three friends and get 25% off.”

    The app businesses create a customized tab on their fan page which encourages fans to submit their cell phone numbers, and also offers a dashboard on the backend which shows a breakdown of the number of total fans, mobile fans, by gender and location. It also lets businesses manage their SMS campaigns. Here are what some sample screens look like, courtesy of AppBistro (one of the startups that launched at our last Disrupt).

    Company: Facebook
    Website: facebook.com
    Launch Date: February 1, 2004
    IPO: NASDAQ:FB

    Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for...

    Learn more
    Company: Appbistro
    Website: appbistro.com
    Launch Date: February 17, 2010
    Funding: $600k

    Appbistro is an application marketplace for Facebook pages. At Appbistro, page administrators can quickly find applications that they can easily plug into their pages and quickly increase the engagement and reach of their pages. The applications within the marketplace are built by known and vetted Facebook developers, and feature applications for Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and more.

    Learn more

    Sponsored Ads

    blog comments powered by Disqus

    Sponsored Ads

    Sponsored Ads

    Upcoming Events

    Disrupt SF 2012

    San Francisco, CA