Start-Up Watch COD: Social Twist delivers strategic precision in digital promotions

The digital world is becoming packed with start-ups focused on finding new ways to distribute coupons. I don’t like most of them one bit. The last thing we need to be doing in digital is creating more platforms that destroy brand value.

But there ARE good reasons and good ways to distribute promotional offers. And in my view, one of the “good guys” in digital promotions is Social Twist, a platform that helps brands deliver more powerful promotional periods by incenting users to distribute offers and information to their friends.

The big difference between Social Twist and so many of the other coupon distributing schemes is strategic precision. This company understands that in order to deliver a promotion with genuine brand-enhancing value, you need to have tools and methods to define the scope, manner of distribution, offers, and redemption methods that jibe with brand objectives and goals. They certainly aren’t the only company that understands the need for strategic precision, but their breadth of possible solutions is unusual and rather impressive.

Specifically, Social Twist can deliver:

Social Engagement Banner ads that place sharable promotional offers in IAB ad units. Such units incorporate refer-a-friend with the discount, enabling users to pass on the good news of savings to others.
Group Buying Discounts are programs that encourage users to get their friends to pool demand for a product in exchange for a discount.
Group Couponing is the promo format that made Groupon famous.
Multivariate Offers: Referrals get any one of a set of random offers. You can also giveaway different offers for existing customers and non-customers.
Geo-Qualified Offers: This tactic leverages the propensity of consumers to share offers with eople close by, and can be a valuable tool for local or regional marketers as well as new store opendings, expanding distribution, and the like.
Refer-a-Friend Offers: These encourage consumers to share an offer.
Share Your Experience Offers: These reward consumers for posting their experiences and testimonials.
Social Coupons: These reward users who make referrals with higher value coupons.
Social Contests: These enable a contest to go social to grow participation
Social Sweepstakes: These enable a sweeps to go social to grow participation.
Here’s their intro vid:



That’s an incredibly broad range of offers, all layered with social to grow impact. Naturally, the tools that are right for an individual brand are going to vary depending upon its objectives. Their breadth of capabilities has helped Social Twist attract a broad range of blue chip advertisers, including:

In short, if you’re looking for broad-based discounting, there are any number of digital vendors that can provide it. If you need precision, it’s great to know that there are companies like Social Twist that can get granular with your goals and devise precise tactics to meet them, all layered with social sharing.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.