Hi, my name is David Lifson and I am the CEO of Postling, a social media management tool. Postling allows businesses to manage all of their social media in one place.
Today, I’m going to share with you three social media ideas that, before Postling, weren’t scalable, feasible, or sensible, but now should all be ideas to consider.
But first, a 2 minute overview of Postling.
Here’s a screenshot of my Postling dashboard. From this single place, I can manage my brands’ social media accounts. We support Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, all of the major blogging platforms, and Flickr. I can publish to all of my accounts, read and respond to my readers’ comments, and track what people are saying about my business on the web.
Let’s do a quick demo. Here, I’m crafting a blog post, which includes a full featured blogging editor that can support video and embedded flash. I check off on the right side which blogging accounts I wish to publish to, and click Publish. I can also schedule the post to publish at a future date if I wish.
Once I’ve published the post, I can update my Twitter and Facebook Fan Page with a message announcing the post and a link to it.
And that’s it! Easy and simple social media publishing.
If anyone comments on my posts, twitter status, or facebook updates, I can read and reply to them all in one place.
In addition to supporting multiple social media accounts, Postling is a multi-user platform. Not only can you share access to your accounts with others, you can also specify the level of access they have to your account. Setting this up is very easy. You simply select which accounts you wish to share and what level of permissions they get. That’s it. No sharing of passwords or security concerns, and you can revoke access at any time.
OK. Now that you have an idea of what Postling is, let’s talk about how it can help you. Idea One: Every brand should have a social media presence. I don’t mean one account for your corporation, I mean every individual brand you own. NBC should have a blog, twitter, and facebook for every TV show, as should Time for every magazine. Hearst should not only have accounts for each of it’s media properties, but also every section of every newspaper - Sports, Business, Lifestyle, and Fashion. With Postling, you can manage all of the accounts for all of these different brands in one place. But of course, you won’t be doing all of that yourself. That’s where idea #2 comes in.
Because Postling allows multiple people to manage multiple accounts, your social media team can all collaborate on these accounts, and you can oversee all of their activity from your Postling dashboard. For example, the marketing director of a music label, which oversees dozens of artists, can share access with each artist’s manager, but only share the accounts for that particular artist. This way, the marketing director has a comprehensive dashboard of all social media activities for all of their brands, but can leave the micro-managing of the accounts to the individual brands. Another collaboration idea was dreamed up by one of our customers, a boutique digital agency here in NY. They have a UK-based client that is producing a video game for the Nintendo Wii and will be using social media to help promote the release of the game. The client, the client’s agency, and the client’s PR firm will all be sharing the social media burden via Postling. An exciting idea and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
Idea number three: Search is interactive, so it’s time to get engaged. Disclaimer: what I’m going to show you is a mockup, as this is not a feature we’ve released to the public or spoken about publicly before today.
This is our new monitoring system, to be released soon. Here, you will see tweets, blog posts, flickr photos, and mainstream media mentions of keywords you care about. In addition to being faster, more comprehensive, and more accurate then Google Alerts, you can immediately reply, retweet, and reblog these results directly from this page. In this example, the search results you see for “Katz’s Deli” are real results from our search provider, Collecta. The results include tweets, Wordpress blog posts, and flickr photos. A brand manager can re-publish these results to their blog, a practice called reblogging. They can also retweet, reply directly to tweets, and post comments directly. They can also track new reviews posted to their Yelp and CitySearch pages. Tying real-time listening and monitoring directly with publishing tools is very powerful, and it will be available with Postling by next month.
Since I’ve got about a minute left, here’s a bonus idea: you don’t need an army of interns. Why? Because Postling turns 20 minute tasks into 2 minute tasks. This is the time savings that comes with having everything in one place - you’re not logging out of one set of accounts, looking up the username and password you’ve written down somewhere for your other accounts, logging in to those, and publishing content.
Here’s the ROI calculation of how much money you could be saving. This assumes a single employee is spending 2 hours a day doing the type of social media work that Postling makes 90% faster. The savings are even greater with multiple employees. There is no reason you shouldn’t be spending your money as effectively as possible.
I’m David Lifson, CEO of Postling. Here’s my contact information, and I would love the opportunity to meet with each of you and discuss ways to make your organization’s social media strategy more scalable and effective. Thank you.