GeoMarketing <www.geomarketing.com>

From streaming videos on Periscope to snapping up sponsorships on Snapchat, brands are consistently searching for the best way to serve relevant messages to the crucial Millennial demographic. SocialTwist, which bills itself as a “social referral” marketing specialist, takes a unique approach to the quest for social users’ attention — it lets them take advantage of all of their own social networks and recommend products and deals to each other.

“SocialTwist’s platform lets parties refer someone to a product, and if that person buys the product both parties get benefited for that, which has helped it really take off,” says Vivek Lakshman, SocialTwist’s cofounder and VP of Product, explaining SocialTwist’s Refer-A-Friend program.

Refer-A-Friend helps marketers to find new customers by incentivizing their current customers to activate their own social networks and refer friends to products or services. If the friend buys, both referrer and referee are rewarded, and so is the business — it made a sale and acquired at least one new customer.

Social (Coupon) Currency

SocialTwist’s other primary social referral product is based on social couponing. Brands can boost in-store sales by allowing coupons to be distributed via social sharing, and by using them as the incentive for these referrals as well. As a result, both parties have, for example, a coupon for 50 percent off at Walgreens, and Walgreens is twice as likely to make a sale since both referrer and referee have a coupon that incentivizes in-store redemption.

Laksham says that the most successful deals are those that are linked to a physical store and a specific geo location.

“We did one for [a CPG marketer] that was specific not only to their stores but specific to a location,” Lakshman says. “It was only in the greater Seattle area that the offer was valid.”

In other words, if social media sharing is the fun that gets people buzzing, location is the context that provides relevancy and grounds the offer in the real world of physical sales. And the more timely and relevant a coupon or deal is, the more likely it is to be redeemed.

Socially Loyal

In the near future, SocialTwist hopes to expands its offerings to include social loyalty, rewarding users not just for the brands they buy, but for engaging with them on social. Lakshman believes that social connections — and content sharing — are behaviors that ultimately spur sales, and deserve to be rewarded on their own.

“We are living in a [hyper] digitally connected world… where people are strongly connected to their friends [via their smartphones],” Lakshman says. “They feel that sharing these offers, etc. with their friends is one way of engaging with them and deepening their relationships with people around them.”