By Aimee Chanthadavong
Tapping into the new online word-of-mouth trend, more than 500 businesses have signed up across 43 categories on socialloot.com to promote their businesses.
Launched in June 2011 by Gary Munitz – the brains behind internet businesses getprice.com.au and menulog.com.au – socialloot.com is a social media marketing outlet for retailers. It allows businesses to promote to users, also known as ‘socialites’, via their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts. Each time a ‘friend’ or ‘follower’ clicks on to the link, the socialite gets paid.
Socialloot.com operates on performance, so businesses only pay when socialites post about them to their friends and followers.
Speaking to RetailBiz, Gary Munitz said social media is increasingly playing an important role in consumer decision-making and socialoot offers a lot of solutions to maximize the positives of social media while minimising the negatives.
“Social media has always played a big role in retail – even before the days of Facebook and Twitter – only back then it was called word-of-mouth. In fact, it is even more effective today as a customer can tell 100 friends about a good (or bad) experience in a second. If you carefully and strategically engage in social media activity, it can be extremely beneficial to your business. For example, a retailer could have a 10 per cent off sale and have that message spread to thousands of people in an instant.,” he said.
“It’s not all about sales. Messages can be ‘biggest range’ and/or ‘great service’. This is one of the main reasons why retailer pays exorbitant rent to be in a shopping centre sso that hundreds of people can see them. Now, the smallest retailer in an obscure side street can have the same benefits at a fraction of the cost.”
Munitz also highlighted that it’s important for retailers who use socialloot.com to clearly see the benefit of each dollar spent.
“Social media to date has not been good on the accountability front. A retailer could create a fan page, spend money acquiring fans then managing those fans, such as pushing messages to them and answering their questions. However, it is not easy to see how many sales are a result from this hard work and marketing spend. Subsequently, people have shied away from social media marketing as it all seems too hard for such a seemingly insignificant result,” he said.
“Socialloot.com makes it easier for businesses to interact with social media by tracking exactly what one marketing dollar has bought them in terms of real business.”
At the same time, when it comes to online security, socialloot.com has been designed to be a protect against cybercrimes.
The company has organised for both businesses and socialites to be protected against online fraud and scammers. This is done by limiting two reviews per day and allows for access limiting should friends and followers not follow the posted link, so socialites only post about brands they feel their friends will be interested in.
According to Munitz, he plans launch socialloot.com overseas in the UK, US, South Africa and New Zealand by the end of the year.
