Salesforce Unveils Self-Serving Social Ad App

Allison Howen
by Allison Howen 30 Apr, 2013

A new self-serving social advertising application, dubbed Social.com, is now available through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

The app connects social ads with CRM and social data, which allows brands and agencies to power ad campaigns on Facebook and Twitter using real-time customer and social listening data. Moreover, the launch of Social.com adds new technology to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which already includes social listening app Salesforce Radian6 and publishing app Salesforce Buddy Media.

"Today Salesforce.com is doubling down on social ads," said Michael Lazerow, CMO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce.com. "Social ads cannot be disconnected from your business. By bringing together Social.com with the world's #1 CRM, Salesforce CRM, and the world's #1 social listening application, Radian6, we've made it possible for marketers to connect social advertising with their customer data and real-time trends to maximize return from their advertising dollars."

With Social.com, brands can create, optimize and automate social ad campaigns. Here are some of the self-serving social ad app's features:

Create social and mobile ad campaigns - Users can build, test and launch social ad campaigns that reach consumers on any device. Marketers can execute more effective campaigns by testing all of the available targeting, creative and placement combinations, to drive both localized and relevant ads. Additionally, they can leverage Facebook and Twitter data to identify the best content for advertising.

Optimize social ad campaigns - Users can track and analyze metrics over time with live campaign monitoring and receive immediate feedback on social ad performance based on particular goals.

Automate social ad campaigns - Users can adjust ad spend by defining rules to make real-time optimization decisions across all ads and campaigns.

It is important to note that Salesforce.com is building on the success of Social.com by delivering new innovations for targeting social ads to make campaigns more relevant and effective. For example, Social.com customers will be able to use Salesforce CRM to connect offline and online purchase data, customer loyalty data, as well as data from contests, sweepstakes, whitepaper downloads and other conversion pages directly to their social ad campaigns in real-time. Furthermore, connecting Social.com with social listening app Radian6 will allow marketers to tap into real-time conversations from more than 500 million sources, including the Twitter Firehose. That said, although Social.com is currently available to the public, its real-time customer data and listening is currently scheduled to be generally available in Summer '13.