Salesforce combines social ads, CRM and listening with Social.com

With the launch of this platform, Salesforce also offers listening app Radian6 and publishing app Buddy Media separately.

“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,” Charlie Wood, area vice-president of APAC, Japan and India for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, told Campaign Asia-Pacific.

Social media has seen exceptional growth in Asia, continued Wood. The region has more than 166 million people using Facebook today, with the biggest growth coming from India, Indonesia and the Philippines. Twitter has more than 200 million users in 33 languages, and 70 per cent of those users are non-US based.

Social.com, a domain name for which Salesforce paid a reported US$2.6 million, will enable Asian marketers who have to execute across many languages and cultures, said Wood.

“Companies need a platform that enables them to listen at scale across regions to identify what is working and tailor their social advertising campaigns based on that information…," he said. "Now they will be able to easily view conversations around their brand, related topics and trends within Social.com to buy and deliver ads in the moment."

According to Salesforce, Social.com’s customers, which include Ford, GroupM and Resolution Media, have already managed more than 500,000 campaigns and 1 trillion impressions. It’s used in 45 countries and targets consumers in nearly 200 countries. As of March 2013, the app has served more than 2.5 billion impressions per day.

These figures appear slightly misleading, however, as these campaigns have probably been run on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, prior to the launch of Social.com, according to an interview by Techcrunch with Salesforce vice-president of product marketing Gordon Evans.

“There’s still a problem here—companies are sitting on this incredible customer data in their CRM systems, but they’re not really connected [to their ad campaigns] in a very efficient manner,” added Evans, who then gave Techcrunch a demo with a test Facebook campaign that targeted different customer groups by importing data from Salesforce.

For clients that have tried Social.com’s CRM capabilities, Wood claimed that an e-commerce client used the app to drive more than 300 per cent in ROI “that can be directly attributed to traffic driven from social ads”. Another telecom client achieved incremental sales of 68 per cent, according to the company.

“These results have been possible because Social.com allows our customers to uncover pockets of ROI across the expansive social ads marketplace and provides businesses with the insights into how and when to communicate with prospective customers,” he said.

Salesforce has also released a demo video for its new launch (below).