SocialWire Knows What You Want to Buy on Facebook

The way that brands used to advertise on the Internet is that they would throw millions of dollars at major sites like AOL and Microsoft and hope their ad  got noticed.  Now, social media advertising is where brands are focused.   But with the massive amounts of people on sites like Facebook, many brands are looking to automated ad companies like SocialWire to target the correct audience.

SocialWire, which coins itself a “recommendation engine for ads,” has developed something called “Dynamic Product Ads.”   This technology takes advantage of Facebook’s targeting capabilities including interest and location and can pinpoint a particular audience for a particular ad.  So instead of showing everyone a generic ad for a store (“Sale at North Face!”), SocialWire can present a target audience with a specific product that they may have shown prior interest in through “likes” on Facebook or prior purchases.  Targeting the correct audience means more click throughs  and more purchases.

“Our whole mission is to automate social advertising and make it as automated as Google AdWords, and I think that’s really what’s going to unlock social ad dollars,” said Bob Buch, CEO of SocialWire.

Social advertising is a big market.  In fact, US brands spent an estimated $4.1 billion on social ads in 2013, according to eMarketer.  Social ad spending is expected to increase to $11 billion in 2017, but Buch believes that kind of growth isn’t attainable with the way that companies are advertising on Facebook now.

“Just looking at what our clients are doing today, where they’re having success and what their problems are, there’s no way that’s going to happen unless we can really automate the way people are advertising on social right now,” Buch said. “Marketing organizations are moving to a very data-driven and automated way of advertising, and right now 0% of that $4 billion spent on social is being done in an automated way and that’s where we come in.”

SocialWire has a number of large clients including One Kings Lane and many others that Buch couldn’t currently name publicly.  The company also plans on expanding to other social networking platforms as they begin to focus on direct response ads.

“Currently we’re only on Facebook because really when it comes to social advertising, Facebook right now, at least for direct response advertising, Facebook is all that matters,” Buch said.  “But Twitter is just starting to really get serious about direct response advertising so we’re actually starting to have conversations there as well, and when Pinterest gets serious about it, then that’s when I think it’s going to be a game changer since they are such a perfect platform.”