When Sprout Social and Simply Measured combined forces, you knew it would only be a matter of time before a great social media management platform for $25 a month or so was a pipe dream. Sprout immediately jumped to $99 per month as an entry point and the combined forces offering positioned the duo as…
Should My Business Use Chat-Based Tools?
Microsoft is a content client. This is a sponsored post, but all thoughts and opinions are my own. Chat-based tools are not new. We’ve all been using text messaging, messenger apps on social media platforms and even good, old-fashioned chat apps for years. How many of you remember the old AOL Chat sessions? If you…
Should You Upgrade Your Community Forum?
Community forum and message boards have been and in many cases are still the backbone of social media. In fact, when the Conversation Research Institute (my research company) dove into understanding online conversations about the senior living and senior care space in February, we discovered that 83 percent of those conversations took place on traditional…
Image Recognition and Analysis Comes to Brandwatch
Image recognition is one of those social media analytics pieces that most social listening companies either can’t get right or charge so much for, no one can afford access. Brandwatch may have cracked the code. It’s new Image Insights feature provides the best image recognition and accompanying analysis I’ve seen in any social listening or…
Build Cheap, Easy Content Curation with eLink.io
The easiest way to get your small business moving in the right direction with social media is to find and share good content relevant to your audience. Sharing links on your social channels is a method of easy content curation. But what if there was a way to do that, but also easily compile those links…
Upstart Agorapulse Offers Competitive Social Media Management Tool
The social media management tool marketplace is a crowded one. For many small businesses, finding one tool to manage multiple social media profiles, keep you abreast of mentions of certain brand names or keywords, and enable you to engage with mentions or your social audiences can be a big, muddy, confusing mess. Agorapulse is a…
Mentionlytics Offers Small Business Social Listening at Reasonable Prices
Finally there is small business social listening platform that is affordable. Mentionlytics has arrived on the scene after a quiet launch in July of last year. The startup, originally begun in Greece but with offices in New York and London now, offers a strong set of social listening features for under $50 per month, putting it…
Hootsuite adds social advertising integrations
For all it’s entry-level glory, Hootsuite also has a fairly impressive enterprise social management platform. That tool just got way more competitive today as the software company announced partnerships with six leading social advertising platforms, further integrating organic social media management with paid social media management. The social advertising solutions joining the Hootsuite integration include…
Sysomos Launches Killer Paid Social Analytics Platform
MasterCard runs paid social in multiple regions around the world. The credit card company used to spend weeks after campaigns ended aggregating data from each region, normalizing currencies to the U.S. dollar, then analyzing the data to understand which campaigns worked in which regions, what creative was optimal and how to improve their ad spend.…
The Big Opportunity In Social Technology Nobody Is Taking
There is a huge opportunity in social technology that nobody is jumping on. I’ve lamented it before and will continue to do so. The honest truth is that whether you’re talking about social media management solutions, social listening or social analytics, no one is focused on helping small businesses. Only in the email marketing category…
Why Google Must Now Fear Facebook
I’ll admit I’m not a technician. What I mean by that is I don’t know how to write code. I’m an observer and user of technology. I can imagine new and exciting things for technology to do. But I cannot, myself, build technology. So when Facebook has its big F8 developer’s conference each year, there’s…
License Instagram Photos With Lefty
One of the hardest elements of strong content strategy to produce with any level of consistency and at a reasonable cost is strong photography. Lefty is trying to change that challenge for brands by offering a simple mechanism to reach out and license Instagram images for use online or off. Just login to the site…