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).
