Building a new kind of loyalty – Social Loyalty

It’s hard to go anywhere online without seeing social media icons, “likes” or stories about how Facebook is being used to enhance retailer loyalty…”social loyalty”. Building social media pages, vying for your “likes” and offering targeted promotions…but then what? What does it really mean to retailers for consumers to “like” something in this way? And what does it mean for prepaid and gift cards? So, I go to one of my favorite sources for marketing research, and information, Mashable and I am instantly tied in with my friends who share the same favorite source. Let’s put this scenario
into a retail ecommerce setting … I’m researching new mobile phones and selected the phone I’m interested in; I could see who my friends are that have “liked” the Droid on Facebook. This is likely to influence my opinion of the product. The bigger picture shows a snapshot of ecommerce transactions excelling exponentially. Last week Adweek published: “Data Shows Real-World Results for Facebook 'Likes', One new fan for a retailer produces 20 website visits”. This is great news for retailers (our clients), but it’s great news for the prepaid industry and its gift card component as well. GCP’s end customers (B2B or bulk buys of gift cards) benefit as well, as the recipients of the gift cards have new ways of engaging with the card brands they are holding.