By Teresa Palagano, www.ballooningnesteggs.com

Another iTunes card...remote control car...Hello Kitty necklace... Another gift destined to pile on top of other gifts?

What if, instead, you could inspire your family to do something more meaningful for your nieces’ and nephews’ celebrations: to pitch in and grow their nest eggs, help them improve the world, and spur them to explore the cooler sides of money.

The explosion of social gifting is changing the way we celebrate special occasions, big and small. The good news: your nieces and nephews are less likely to return gifts or toss them aside with a roll of the eyes. The bad news: adults have to ensure that kids are “gifting” responsibly. Here’s a primer on all sorts of social gifting options.

I’ve been coasting on iTunes cards for a while now. With a crew of 16 nieces and nephews and zero time to cruise the mall, it’s become my go-to gift for the litany of birthdays, graduations, holiday parties, and special events that involve presents. It’s tired, lazy, and well, lame. “Here, kid, go get yourself an app,” doesn’t really convey the love and affection I have for these wonderful children in my life. I had to do better. After some research, I discovered that thoughtful, meaningful gifting can be about apps—you just have to find the right ones.

Today’s slew of social gifting sites and apps offer help matching people with presents without complex spreadsheets or hours of shopping. So, I broke out my newfound e-skills at a family dinner last month. I owed my 15-year-old niece a birthday gift, and after I overheard her say she’d been pining for this way-expensive lash enhancer, I opened the social gifting app I had downloaded, selected her gift from my array of Facebook friends, wrote a clever personalized message, and posted a Sephora gift card to her Facebook wall. In seconds, she was thanking me for the “epic” gift and bam, I went from ho-hum aunt to hip.

Social gifting, with its ease of use, has become the latest big buzzword in e-commerce. Facebook Gifts upped the wattage on using social media as a convenient means of giving friends and loved ones a present when it launched just before the 2012 holiday season. Now, most Facebook users are familiar with the birthday reminders and nudges to gift your friend a Starbucks card for her special day. But an explosion of players in the space has opened a ton of social gifting options. By tapping into your connections on social networks (primarily Facebook at this point) and getting prompts to give gifts to friends and family for loads of occasions, social gifting is making it far easier to deliver gifts loved ones will actually like and enjoy.

In short, we can tap into our social networks to celebrate moments, big (e.g., a wedding) and small (e.g., a promotion) through services that cull information, such as what music a friend has “liked” or products they’ve put on online “wish lists” or have flat out told their social networks they want. Conveniences abound as companies offer deeply varied, personalized, sometimes free choices.

Lots of financial analysts agree that this nascent business model might indeed transform the way we exchange gifts. “The unexploited potential of e-gifting will allow gift carding to reach deeper into day-to-day transactions and replace ways that we pay for casual transactions—everything ranging from gifts to family members to how we pay the babysitter or gardener,” says CEB TowerGroup analyst Brian Riley. “Social gifting has plenty of room to grow and you will be certain to see strong growth through the decade.”

Last year, social gifting ballooned into a cool $1 billion business out of the $100 billion gift card industry. And Wrapp, one of the larger players, revealed in February that it grew to 1+ million users in just 14 months. Retailers are also putting stock in social gifting. Starbucks, for instance, has reported that it expects social gifting to account for as much as 20% of its business in the near future.

So, what does this all mean for our nieces and nephews? As gift recipients, they’ll be more likely to get gifts they actually want. And as gift givers, they’ll be able to give gifts that are more meaningful and adored. But here’s the flipside: all the reminders and offers to send lots of gifts for lots of special occasions can confuse kids who are new to social media. We want our nieces and nephews to have big, generous hearts, but we can’t afford to send every kid in the class a $30 five-pound gummy bear for his or her birthday.

“Teen’s specifically are at a stage in their life where they lack impulse control,” says Josh Shipp, teen behavior expert. “Without guidelines, supervision and instruction [social gifting offers] are putting them up against something they can’t defeat.” The key is education and supervision, he says. “There is a great service called Zabra that notifies you of what your teen [niece or nephew] is up to online (without spying) and educates you about how to help [him or her] use social media responsibly. You’ve seen what your [niece or nephew] can do with a cell phone and texting, the last thing  you want is a bill for two hundred dollars for some virtual gifts.”

To help you and the kids navigate this new method of celebrating and giving, you’ll need a roadmap of the players, the offers, the pitfalls, and the opportunities. The social gifting sites and apps primarily tap social data on Facebook—which means this applies to kids 13 and older (the minimum age for kids to “legitimately” have Facebook accounts). Here’s a snapshot of what’s available at the moment:

Gift Matchmakers
These are the social gifting sites that primarily aim to help you match a person with a present.

-Amazon Friends and Family Gifting: Link your Amazon and Facebook accounts, and this service uses Facebook profile data to remind you of special occasions and suggest the perfect presents for your social network. Gift suggestions land on the recommendations pages of Amazon based on a friend’s Facebook profile, such as music and movie likes, and also their Amazon wish list. So, when it’s your cousin’s birthday, you’ll know he’s into biking and that he’s hoping for a new helmet.

-Etsy: If you prefer to give homemade, vintage, and one-of-a-kind gifts, this is for you. Link your Facebook account to Etsy and get gift ideas based on your friends’ likes. One bonus: you can filter by price.

-Facebook Gifts: For the moment, this is one of the social gifting options that deliver physical gifts to the recipient. You see that one of your “friends” has a birthday or anniversary and pick out a present from its growing list of partners. Your friend gets a notice, enters his own address and can tweak the present (e.g., different size or flavor) before it ships.

Click here for more social gifting sites.

Do you think social gifting is something you’d let your niece or nephew use? Tell us why on our Facebook page.

Photo: marin
Published: April 2, 2013