Salesforce.com Unifies Social Acquisitions

Salesforce.com today launched Social.com, a social advertising application designed to streamline the social marketing process alongside sister Marketing Cloud applications Salesforce Radian6 and Salesforce Buddy Media.

In February, the cloud computing company revealed Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Ads Platform for Twitter, enabling brands and ad agencies to scale real-time social campaigns using the new Twitter ads API. With the launch of Social.com, users can further optimize Facebook and Twitter ad campaigns by tapping into unified social listening and customer contact data.

Born out of the $689 million acquisition of social media marketing platform Buddy Media last summer, Social.com builds on key features from Buddy's offering, including social ad management capabilities afforded by the Facebook Ads API partner software provider Brighter Option, which Buddy Media added to its enterprise suite last February.

Brighter Option was selected from more than 20 Facebook advertising technology partners for its scalable technology, team, and business model, the company said at the time of the acquisition. Brighter Option powered large-scale advertising agencies like Aegis, GroupM, and Omnicom with a self-service tool for managing Facebook advertising.

According to Gartner, 28 percent of marketers have reported a reduced investment in traditional advertising budgets in order to accommodate the growth in digital marketing--social, mobile, and data-driven marketing efforts among them.

"Marketers today are emphasizing the use of content marketing as part of a shift to drive more inbound marketing," said Laura McLellan, a research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. Inbound marketing is predicated on maintaining more of a dialogue with an audience through social marketing or communities, as opposed to traditional outbound email marketing, for example.

By combining the social monitoring capabilities of Salesforce Radian 6 with the social content and publishing abilities of Salesforce Buddy Media, the Social.com application is designed to close the loop and give marketers ways to create and deliver more targeted, localized ads based on social data, as well as offline and online purchase data available in the Salesforce.com CRM. Using social ad performance metrics, Social.com also helps users optimize goals and automatically adjust spending in real time.