Turbo Charged Social Marketing

Just back from OMMA Social which SimpleFeed sponsored. Lots of great content but the one that stood out was one of the first direct marketing case studies on Facebook sharing that I have seen. It was presented by Christine Morrison, Social Media Manager for the Turbo Tax division at Intuit. You can watch the video here.

Taxes do not seem to be an inherently social topic, but Intuit is a learning culture that tried a couple initiatives during the past tax season. Basically a user of Turbo Tax’s web-based tax service could share/like the service. Intuit presented a slide that represents the new sales funnel for social marketing. Expose a large number of visitors to the share/like opportunity and only a small number do. However, once that share/like goes to their friends’ newsfeeds and attracts comments, the message reaches a larger number prospects than those who saw the original share/like opportunity.

Thus the “funnel” bulges in the middle. Intuit found those who saw the item in their newsfeed were four times more likely to click than through to TurboTax than those who saw an online advertisement. While Intuit was understandably evasive on actual numbers for competitive reasons, they did share that this was their number one online program for getting new customers – Wow!