Social Media For Local Business
While running my own social media marketing agency in New York, siteforbiz.com , i came across many limitations:
- We were doing marketing for local business, so each location has their own reviews and user generated content around the location. So we had to listen and kepp checking each review channel manually.
- Each place has his own facebook, twitter, pinterest and foursquare accounts.
- We had to manually maintain and curate each email list for each of those locations.
- Business owners lacks the creative to come up with their own specials, posts and content. Plus they had limited content to commit to any consistency when it comes to providing content to us, even as easy as fresh photos around the place.
- There is a huge chunk of the small business market that are not willing to pay more then few hundred dollars for social media marketing.
In order for us to manage each campaign, we had to either do individual manual work, or do what any online marketer would do, use third party software. So i started compiling all the tools needed to accomplish the above with some type of semi-automation, and centralization.
After days looking around and trying many solutions, it was merely impossible for me to find one complete solution! We had to create multiple email marketing accounts, use many different social media dashboards and reputation management tools.
Now we were facing more problems:
- Our cost for each account has grown tremendously.
- Our work is still fragmented across multiple platforms.
- Manual work still needed to be done, like collecting customer feedback via comment cards.
- There was no one login that could be provided to the client, so he can check and contribute to the campaign, not even if they decided to do so on a limited level.
- Each social media account manager has full access to all the accounts, without the ability for me to manage or oversee their individual work.
I decided to build my own solution, Vbout.com.
Initially, i drafted a set of 5 functionality to build: collect customer feedback via phone, track yelp reviews, publish to facebook and twitter remotely and a basic email marketing tool. The solution did not seem complete and i felt we are not setting ourselves apart from competition and lacking some more needed core features. And from here on i knew that the software will take over 1 year to fully build and customize!
Since then we have added the following functionality:
- Full foursquare integration.
- Consolidated over 7 online review channels.
- Added linkedin and pinterest.
- Ability to add multiple social profiles, i.e: facebook, twitter and linkedin.
- Refined the email marketing capability.
- Added lot of reporting and automation.
- Easy multi-account toggle.
- Drag and drop smart calendar.
- Satellite monitoring of social efforts of each account via one master account.
We are still far from finished and i have an amazing set of functionality with complex algorithm that i have spent weeks developing, even in my sleep.
My goal is not to only create a social media dashboard but also a virtual social media assistant that automate whole campaigns with accuracy and regard to the specific type of business and their social media stock.
Me and my team are committed to creating an amazing software with an easy to use interface and complete automation features that empowers business owners to run their online social media marketing on their own, and franchise/agency marketing managers to manage and maintain their brand by easily overseing the efforts done by all their individual location managers.
