In the e-commerce industry, a little saying goes hand-in-hand with referral and rewards programs. “Your next best customer is your current best customer’s friend.”

Refer-a-friend programs come in all shapes and sizes and are used by a number of e-commerce Web sites. With the impact social media has had on e-commerce, this year we’re seeing the trend for online retailers to move their traditional, and somewhat stagnant, refer-a-friend campaigns to social media platforms.

SocialTwist, a company that creates widgets to combine marketing messages with visitor referrals, offers a new program to online retailers.  Dubbed the Tell-a-Friend Holiday Sales Booster (TAF HSB), it combines social media word-of-mouth referrals and rewards to help e-commerce sites boost their sales this holiday season.

The SocialTwist widget lets shoppers spread the word about you on a number of social media sites — and be rewarded at the same time. (Click for larger image).

How SocialTwist Widgets Work

SocialTwist widgets work on a simple premise. You choose a subscription package, copy code to you own site to display the tell-a-friend options, and then use SocialTwist’s analytics to see how well your word-of-mouth marketing campaigns do over time.

A nice and tidy widget displays on your site and gives site visitors a number of ways to share a message about you with their friends. Vijay Pullur, president of SocialTwist, calls it a “word-of-mouth widget” that lets visitors share a quality messages about you with their friends in a single click.

On a product page, for example, site visitors might see a small image icon for “Tell & Save.” When clicked, the SocialTwist widget opens in a new browser window (or tab), and your visitor can choose to e-mail their friends a message or post the message to their favorite social site, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed and identi.ca.

They could also message instant messenger (IM) buddies on Google Talk, Live, Yahoo and AIM or post the message on social bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us. Lastly, the message can be shared on one of several popular blogging services, like as Blogger and WordPress.

When deciding on which message delivery to use, you can log in to your account right from the SocialTwist widget. SocialTwist does not store any usernames and passwords — it also provides a privacy policy link right in the widget to boost your customer’s confidence in using the widget.

SocialTwist Combines Products, Creates Holiday Sales Booster

The company offers a number of products designed to suit any online business with referral traffic of any size. There is a free version called TAF4Free that lets your site visitors send out a brief text-based message about your service or product. TAF4Branding lets you customize the message being sent with a branded banner, a personal note, an image and a brand description.

Two other packages include TAF4Commerce and TAF4Rewards. These are the products offered in the Tell-a-Friend Holiday Sales Booster program.

Pullur describes the TAF4Commerce product as a dynamic solution. "We dynamically capture the content on the page from which your visitor wants to send the refer-a-friend message,” said Pullur. “When the message goes out, it includes brand or product images, product information, links, price details and any special offers you have running."

The program also includes TAF4Rewards, a product that lets you easily launch your own custom refer-a-friend campaign and reward the people who spread the word about your brand or products. Through TAF4Rewards you can create any number of campaigns to reward any referral action or click-throughs. For example, when visitors refer a friend they can obtain a coupon code discount, or you could run a sweepstakes that offers a bonus entry for each referral who signs up.

Pricing and Availability

SocialTwist's Tell-a-Friend Holiday Sales Booster is available now through January 2010. Signing up early will provide a full three months of the service for a flat rate of $1,500, regardless of the number of referral messages sent using the service. The holiday program combines TAF4Commerce (regularly $3,000 per year) and TAF4Rewards (regularly $5,000).

Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.