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.