Salesforce.com launches self-serve social ad app
Social.com can manage social ad campaigns on Facebook and Twitter using real-time customer and social conversation data.
Salesforce.com is turning things up a notch for its Marketing Cloud platform with a new product styled similarly to its other cloud-based products: Social.com.
Social.com stems from Salesforce's acquisition of Buddy Media and its subsidiary, the London-based Brighter Option.
Thus, the Marketing Cloud now boils down to three core areas: social media listening (Radian6), publishing content (Buddy Media), and branding (Social.com). The new service is described as a self-serve application for use by agencies, brands, developers, retailers and advertisers in developing, automating, and managing social ad campaigns.
Touting it as the first platform that connects social ads with CRM and social media monitoring, Salesforce boasted that digital marketers will be able to power their campaigns across networks (such as Facebook and Twitter) using real-time data from Social.com. The spend on social advertising is expected to more than double in the next four years, rising to $11 billion in 2017, according to BIA Kelsey.
The San Francisco-headquartered company asserted that up until now, there has been "no way" to connect social ad campaigns to real-time conversations on social networks.
Thus, Salesforce boasted that Social.com enables marketers to draw upon these conversations from more than 500 million sources and then turn around to buy and deliver ads in the moment.
Based on the demo, if a user has all of the variables (i.e. creative images, copy, etc.) ready to go, a social ad campaign could be set up through the Social.com wizard within 10 minutes.
That set-up includes punching in audience targeting metrics (i.e. specific locations, ages, etc.), budgeting bidding options, and determining where the campaign is going to be delivered (i.e. which networks, mobile channels, etc.).
"The idea is that we're trying to bring agencies a lot closer with brands to make these campaigns easy and efficient," explained Gordon Evans, vice president of product marketing for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud unit, during a product demo on Monday.
Social.com is available to clients immediately, but real-time listening and CRM integration won't be added until this summer.
This story first appeared on ZDNet under the headline "Salesforce.com beefs up Marketing Cloud with Social.com."