Driving Revenue From Social Beyond Facebook

Facebook has already proven that it can drive tremendous value to direct response campaigns. Right rail combined with dynamic news feed ads that are based on customer’s behavior outside Facebook show visitors much more tailored ads, driving a substantial lift to your social programs and leading to a huge boost in engagement when compared to retargeting campaigns that are run on other exchanges.

But how can you drive additional revenue from social media beyond just Facebook? Well, there are a few ways to do it, but in this post, we are going to focus on two in particular that have been spawning some great buzz.

Pinterest has been around for a while and it’s a great way for retailers to showcase their products and get in front of potential customers. But it’s not just about posting product pictures and hoping for the best. For several advertisers, Pinterest has already proven to be of incredible value when it comes to driving online conversions. Through “promoted pins” brands can push the products they want their customer to see, which will in turn yield higher brand engagement and incremental revenue.

Understanding how to leverage this tool can be quite valuable and some brands are a few steps ahead in the game already. A good example of this is Target, the second largest retailer in the United States. The giant has just launched a beta site, Target Awesome Shop, which features top trending products on Twitter that are also on Target.com highlighted as top reviewed products. Target has already seen a significant lift in traffic coming from Pinterest to Target.com, since launching promoted pins earlier this year.

Nordstrom is another good example. The upscale fashion retailer is using Pinterest to help them identify trends in order to market the right products to their consumer. In other words, a lot of the merchandising you see, not only at Nordstrom.com but also inside brick and mortar locations, are being chosen based on Pinterest trends and specially marked with red tags, letting customers know that these are hot trending products right now on Pinterest.

The startup hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize their product yet, which means, “promoted pins” are currently free, however, you should expect to pay for it in the coming year. Perhaps now it’s a great time to start testing.

For the longest time, Twitter could not quite figure out how to turn its enormous customer base and reach into a cash model product. These days are over, in fact, they have been for a while since Twitter rolled out “promoted tweets” back in 2010. The latest news from the social media site came out just last Thursday, December 5th, when Twitter formally introduced Retargeting With Tailored Audiences. This will allow advertisers to engage with users on Twitter that have shown interest in their brand outside of Twitter.

Through a number of DSP (demand-side platform) and DMP (data-management platform) partners, brands who wish to engage with customers who have previously interacted with their brand, either through their website or a display ad, now have the ability of doing so by matching the user’s cookie ID with the Twitter’s account holder ID in order to promote tweets in-stream. Through the use of DMP’s, brands can also engage with potential customers through third-party data, reaching a much broader set of ‘tailored audiences’ who might be likely to convert with their brands.

A potential downside, is that Twitter, unlike Facebook, does not support RTB (real-time bidding) at the moment.