LivingSocial, Twitter Beef Up Marketing and Monetization
This week we saw a couple of the biggest players in social media with some very big news, starting with LivingSocial. The number two daily deals service behind Groupon, LivingSocial is currently operating in 206 markets and employs more than 1,300. The company expects to expand to 400 markets this year, and the whopping $400 million it just raised brings it a lot closer to achieving that goal. Neil Ashe, former president of CBS Interactive, joined LivingSocial’s board.
“As expected, LivingSocial has raised $400 million in funding, bringing the company’s total raised to date to more than $600 million. The round included new and existing investors, such as Amazon.com.”
Similar sites have raised funding, too, in the last 48 hours, notably Chicago-based club-focused daily deals site Poggled. The”Groupon for Nightlife” raised $5.6 million at a $33 million pre-money valuation. Indeed, Poggled lives up to its nickname, considering that Groupon investors and co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell as well as New Enterprise Associates principal Tom Grossi were all noted in an SEC form.
Poggled currently only operates in the Chicago area, but with its recent funding it probably already has some plans for expansion. Twitter of course is another company who’ve expanded yesterday – significantly expanded its offerings portfolio, that is.
On the other side of localized target marketing, Twitter president of revenue Adam Bain spoke at the Ad Age Digital Conference, and announced a new dashboard for marketers that lets them target tweet at specific locations. The dashboard also provides insight into who is following their account, enables them to view a timeline of their follower base growth, look into the general and location break down and more. This tool has been in beta around a month, and it just hit general availability.
Bain continued his speech by highlighted some interesting figures, which indicate Twitter is doing a pretty good job increasing the monetization of the huge amount of big data it has access to. Accordi9ng to Bain, over 600 corporate customers signed up for promoted tweets – compared to only 6 last year.
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