With $2 million in seed capital from First Round Capital, Dave McClure, Joi Ito, Ariel Poler and Brian Sugar, SocialWire wants advertisers to hyper-optimize their Facebook ads experience. With SocialWire, brands can get users to organically share a story on Facebook’s Open Graph, and then use Facebook Sponsored Stories to promote that story to its most valuable potential customers.
In the same space as Nanigans, SocialWire differentiates itself from competitors by bridging earned media (organic social shares) and paid media (promoted Newsfeed stories). It is the only ads platform that does this presently.
The service is currently accomplishing this double-header with its two core products, SocialWireCONNECT, which allows you to customize Open Graph Timeline actions with one line of code, and SocialWireAMP, which allows more granular targeting of these Timeline actions (now Sponsored Stories), targeting all friends of a given gender, for example.
SocialWire functions as a Facebook Open Graph partner for the first part of its offering and an ads platform partner for the second half.
Minding past Newsfeed and Facebook Privacy upheavals, the company is very cautious with regards to how it serves up ads like “Bob just added the iPad Mini to his wishlist at Bestbuy.com” on the Open Graph, cluing users in to what activity will be shared and refraining from letting brands name individual users in their Sponsored Stories.
“We think there is a huge opportunity in helping companies market the long tail of their product catalog to their long tail audiences,” says former Digg Biz Dev guy and current SocialWire Revenue Chief Bob Buch (who I go way back with). “We have a way of efficiently creating ads out of millions of products in a retailer’s catalog, and then using programmatic signals to find the right audiences for each ad.”
Buch joined the company because he felt that CEO Selcuk Atli was broadening the vision that Buch himself had set forth with DiggAds. “DiggAds went on to become the legacy for other social native ad products like Promoted Tweets and Facebook Sponsored Stories,” he writes. “Seeing the success of DiggAds made me a believer that advertising is not a zero-sum game – if users like the ad experience, marketers will do better.”
SocialWire monetizes by taking a commission on ad spend; it recently took on Bonobos as a customer and is excited about what its one-two punch approach can mean for brands that want a more holistic approach to social advertising. “We’ve been to clients where the organic growth team is not talking to the marketing team,” Buch says, in candor. “We literally introduced them to each other.”
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