• SocialTwist Reaches 100,000 Websites, Former Googler Sanjeev Agrawal Appointed President

    Sarah Perez

    Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. → Learn More

    Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
    socialtwist

    Social marketing company SocialTwist announced today that it has now reached 100,000 websites, including those run by major brands like ConAgra Foods, P&G, Sara Lee, Barnes & Noble, Jamba Juice, Intel and others. The sites use SocialTwist’s enterprise-grade platform to identify and grow their audiences, including core brand influencers. Over the past 12 months, more than 4.8 million consumers have engaged with SocialTwist’s “Tell-a-Friend” feature, which encourages social sharing across Facebook, Twitter, email and instant messaging.

    SocialTwist has also just appointed former Googler Sanjeev Agrawal, who once was Head of Google Product Marketing, as President of the company. While there, his goal will be to help SocialTwist navigate its way through its next growth period.

    Prior to joining SocialTwist, Agrawal was VP Products at TellMe, acquired by Microsoft, and the CEO of Aloqa, acquired by Motorla. He says that the appeal of SocialTwist was the flexibility of the platform, which seems to be more effective than search for the brands involved – at least in terms of ROI.

    Show Us the Money: Referrals and Click-Thrus

    We asked SocialTwist for some examples of this claim, and it reported that its own statistics show an average 66% click-thru rate on friend referrals, and over 50% redemption rate on offers, in comparison with the typical digital coupon click-thru rate of just 18%.

    In particular, when Sara Lee ran a social couponing campaign, it saw over 65,000 visitors in a month, the majority of which were friend referrals. And over 64% chose to refer friends in exchange for a $2.50 coupon, 30% picked a $1 coupon and 5% took a $0.50 coupon. 71% of these referrals were handled by email, 27% through Facebook and just a paltry 1% through Twitter – incidentally, the same number as MySpace. However, in terms of actual click-thrus, Twitter did better – 29.3%, versus 40.7% for Facebook and 29.3% for email.

    ConAgra Foods also ran a campaign recently which garnered 16,200 participants over 6 weeks, 29,613 referrals and had a click-thru rate of 43%. In this case, the top referral channel was email, but the top click-thru channel was Twitter.

    In other campaigns, a baby product generated 300,000 referrals in 6 weeks, a photo contest received 800,000 registrations in 30 days and a $1 coupon from a fast food chain accounted for 10% of new traffic to the company’s website during the promotional period.

    Results like these are what are pushing SocialTwist into its next phase: scaling the company. Prior to now, much of social marketing was still in an “experimental phase,” says the company,  now it’s able to join other channels as key part of marketing budgets.


    Company: SocialTwist
    Website: socialtwist.com
    Launch Date: September 2008

    SocialTwist is a customer acquisition platform that creates social referrals for leading brands, retailers, publishers. More than 40 leading brands use the SocialTwist platform to drive social referrals and generate new business. The platform builds and integrates social referral processes and technology into marketing programs. The platform has been tried and tested across hundreds of dissimilar campaigns involving acquisition, rewards, loyalty and various other program objectives. The platform resolves complex issues around privacy, compliance, security, scalability, and fraud management - show-stopper...

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    Person: Sanjeev Agrawal
    Website: linkedin.com
    Companies: collegefeed, Aloqa, WikiSeer

    Sanjeev is the founder of collegefeed. Before collegefeed, Sanjeev was CEO of Aloqa, a mobile push platform (acquired by Motorola) Head of Product Marketing for Google, and VP Products and Marketing at Tellme Networks (acquired by Microsoft). Sanjeev is also an advisor to SocialTwist, the leading enterprise SAAS platform for social marketing. He holds a BS and MS in EECS from MIT, spent 4 years as a management consultant at McKinsey &Co., and 3 at Cisco Systems. He pretends...

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