C2C marketing that’s powered up with gamification, points, rewards, and data is the future of organic reach and social media engagement. And the stats back this view:
- Spitche’s brand ambassador campaign saw L’Oreal Canada get the highest level of engagement across all the beauty brand’s branches worldwide.
- Decathlon increased its organic engagement on Facebook by 37% in two months by incentivizing interactions.
- ISC Paris grew its reach per post by 53% in just one month with Spitche’s brand ambassador program.
So, the strategy is solid. What about the platform?
If you need to contrast and compare Smile.io vs SocialToaster, this overview summarizes the features, processes, and benefits of each. I look at their core features, how they work, how they’re similar, and how they’re different.
🌟 Also, I talk about Spitche, which helps you create social media ambassadors and drives UGC through gamification, and comes with a full-service team that handles the whole program for you. 🌟
Smile.io
Smile.io, which rebranded from Sweet Tooth Rewards in 2017, is primarily a customer loyalty platform for small businesses. As you’d expect then, you can use it to reward customers for referrals with loyalty points, discounts, and free products.
Also, you can use the platform to encourage online engagement by awarding points for product reviews, sharing and following on social media, and celebrating birthdays. The admin dashboard is easy to customize, and customers have a nice, simple rewards panel (which you can brand) to see what they’ve earned and what they need to get their next reward.
The overwhelming majority of users love the customer support team—which is clearly very responsive—despite one or two voices of concern about the pricing, which may be because of the big jump between plans. At the time of writing, Plus, which is for up to 7, 500 monthly orders, is $999/month, whereas Growth, which is the next plan down and for up to 2,500 orders, is $199/month.
It’s also worth noting that lots of reviews are from long-term users of the platform—a strong indicator of customer satisfaction. However, as a social media engagement tool, Smile.io is somewhat limited: It doesn’t provide features for managing social media accounts, scheduling posts, or analyzing social media metrics. Instead, its focus is on leveraging social media as a part of a broader loyalty strategy.
Top features
- Points program for customers
- Referral program
- VIP program
- Integration with e-commerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce
- Customizable rewards panel
SocialToaster
SocialToaster has three different platforms for content sharing and engagement. The Enterprise version helps you get employees and existing customers to share content, which you can promote via email, text messaging, Slack, or Teams. CommunityToaster is for small businesses and is currently in beta.
It helps you engage users and build communities with a streamlined way to share content with ambassadors. These users are then incentivized with exclusive prizes and experiences to share the content across their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. Meanwhile, PromoToaster helps you launch and manage contests.
Unfortunately, there’s very little in the way of recent user reviews online—during my research, the best I could find was from February 2023, then you have to go back to 2020 for any opinions. Nevertheless, most comments seem to agree that the platform is user-friendly and “low-maintenance.”
That said, one user found it difficult to award prizes for extra, specified actions, while another hoped for a feature to review emails before they’re sent out. From looking through the help desk, though, those features are available, so it’s possible that some advanced management tools simply require extra guidance from the support team.
Top features
- Easy content distribution
- Customizable campaigns
- Gamification and rewards
- User engagement tracking
- Detailed analytics
👀 Spitche: A tech-driven solution that manages your entire ambassador program from acquisition to monetization
Spitche is a next-gen social engagement solution. We run your entire social media engagement program, from opt-in to monetizing them. We identify your most engaged consumers on Instagram, Facebook, and TitTok, and incentivize them to engage, invite, and purchase higher quantities.
With a Spitche program, you grow your social media presence and drive UGC, plus you have a whole team behind you to run, manage, and monetize your ambassador program.
Spitche has software and account managers to help you set it up and maintain it with you, advising you on how to make the most of the platform. Plus, there’s customer support for your ambassadors, too.
🔧 Here’s how it works:
- Create a social media engagement program with your Spitche team. This gamifies social media interactions with your brand using points, goals, and rewards.
- The Spitche team creates all your assets from the landing page to the ads and emails.
- The Spitche team works with you to set up rewards, tiers, and points to get the highest engagement possible.
- Spitche invites your biggest fans to the program. Your future brand ambassadors register their social media accounts with you, and you receive opt-ins and first-party data. Your ambassadors now start amplifying content and creating UGC. This increases your organic reach, followers, and social media engagement.
- Collect brand ambassador data to increase conversion rates. For example, you can see their favorite teams or sports stars, which you can use to optimize your content.
- Review clear, easy-to-manage reporting on your campaigns. Get fast, transparent reports on engagement rates, reach, and ROI.
Our team helps you get authentic UGC about your brand, so you have the content of genuine brand lovers to supercharge your social media campaigns.
And, you can use data from your programs to track social media interactions, event participation, and product interest. Setting KPIs and analyzing metrics in Spitche is simple and will help you hone your strategy to boost audience engagement.
🎩 Top benefits
- Fully managed, gamified ambassador program—30% month-over-month growth of social media engagement
- Deep social media API
- Advanced UGC management
- Data gathering for integrated CRM and marketing optimization
- User-friendly interface with quick & simple program launch
- Exclusive integration with Primsell for NFT campaigns
🤩 The social-proof bit
“After 6 months, 70% of our fan base were new contacts, our social ads targeting performed above our average performance and our Index also grew. Mission accomplished!”
– Laurent Dubois, L’Oréal
“With Spitche, we managed to reach over 2.7M users in our target audience on Facebook organically, turning over 30k followers to identified and engaged ambassadors.”
– Yoann Robert, TF1 Groupe
Make more of your best customers
If there are people who love what you do, give them a reason to share it with the world—so you can tap into their communities, inspire UGC, and promote your brand in a way that resonates with your target audience.
Our dedicated team sets up your brand ambassador programs, identifies your best customers, and invites them along for the ride. Then we’ll make sure you get the most our of your campaigns, track performance, and learn more about your followers.
🐝 By turning your loyal customers into your strongest marketing asset, you can create a buzz for your brand and start driving stunning engagement metrics and ROI.
