Social Gifting Goes Digital, Becoming Popular with Users and Advertisers
By Karla Robinson
October 1, 2012
October 1, 2012
- Social gifting is growing up. No longer just about virtual goods, digital gift-giving has evolved to allow friends to easily send physical items while also letting brands “become a part of the conversation between friends,” writes AllFacebook.
- Following Facebook’s acquisition of gift card app Karma, the social network has launched Gifts, a native program to compete with Wrapp, Gifties and other social gifting services. It enables Facebook users to send physical gifts such as Gund teddy bears, Starbucks gift cards and Star Wars flash drives.
- “The action appears next to Post and Photo options, above the prompt to write on a person’s timeline. The friend then fills in their address to receive the real-life gift (unlike SuperPoke, these presents are real),” the post explains. “Facebook also prompts users to give gifts when they click on a friend’s birthday announcement in the top-right corner of the news feed.”
- In addition to reducing the friction of gift giving, social gifting aims to provide opportunities for advertisers.
- According to Wrapp co-founder and COO Carl Fritjofsson, a gift card or personal message that comes from a personal contact holds more weight than a brand simply emailing a discount offer.
- “For consumers, it’s all about casual gifting, as well as significant gifting. From a retailer’s prospective, it’s generating store traffic through very genuine and friend-to-friend contacts,” Fritjofsson says. “Facebook is essential to the way that we built our platform… We think that social gifting is definitely going digital, and Facebook is the natural way to facilitate that, because of the friendship graph.”
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