Postling - Tutorial5 Group5

 

Description
Postling is a website that provides social media management tools and marketing to small businesses by allowing companies to view and control multiple social media sties such as Facebook, Twitter, linkedin, Tumblr, and Yelp through one centralized location. If companies manage multiple brands or accounts, they can easily manage those too.
Companies can also write posts in advance and schedule times for their publication. A daily digest summarizes account activity from multiple sites.

 

 

Advantages

The biggest biggest advantage of Postling is being able to publish and reply to Twitter, Facebook, youtube, Flickr and blog comments from one location, which ultimately saves time and energy. Postling also has the ability to get near-instant updates when someone reviews or comments about your brand on Yelp or Citysearch. Depending on your business, this feature can be important for customer relations.
Postling sends sends you a daily digest email of any significant activity you've received on any of your social media accounts so you don't have to waste time checking each social media site for updates.
Postling allows allows companies to manage everything with an iphone via a free app for registered users. Features of the app include reading and responding to comments, publishing new posts, and monitoring keyword-tracking results, thus allowing optimal organization for users.

 

Disadvantages
One of the biggest disadvantages of Postling is the lack of privacy due to the fact that they are aloud to share, sell, lend or lease information to third parties.
Even though the number of social media networks and services Postling connects to is not bad, it is missing other social networks like stumbleupon, Digg, etc. In addition, Postling connects well to self-hosted wordpress blogs, but is missing connections to the Posterous blogging system.

Who Use It?
Postling's target client is small businesses. However, they do not specialize in a specific type of small business, as they market themselves to any business that may use social media sites. Some of Postling’s clients include Midtown Comics, Paragon Sports and Butter Lane Cupcakes. There are some bigger clients as well, such as Nine West and Lexmark.

Future Use

Postling's target newest project, Social Media Boot Camp, aims at providing small businesses with solid advice and profiles of proven strategies to help build better online brands. Postling has also figured out that after years of using tools that seem to give an overwhelming and unnecessary amount of data, reports, and graphs, it’s time for social media tools start getting smarter and more effective. Therefore, Postling has created Suggestions to specify information to an industry, geography, media format, or even a time of day. With 15 million posts in their database and growing quickly, they have an incredible amount of data that can be aggregated and mined to answer questions like “What’s the best time of day to publish a post for real estate agents vs. Restaurants?”
In the future, Postling is aiming to use to use collective intelligence, data mining, and disparate apis to help everyday people get results they couldn’t get by using Facebook, Twitter or Wordpress alone.

 

How Prevalent is the Technology?

 

Postling has has become one of the most popular social media business tools as their focus on small business is in increasing demand as this size of organization doesn’t necessarily have the resources or need for a dedicated social marketing employee or IT department.
Postling certainly looks attractive for the types of business where social media falls under the responsibility of staff that already have other full-time roles. Postling allows small business owners to establish a useful and effective online social media presence, without having to dedicate financial investment or more than ten or fifteen minutes a day to it.
Postling is rapidly growing and a highly useful social media aggregator that has raised $350,000 of investment as it continues to grow its 21,000 registered users, representing around 10,000 businesses and range of services. This data confirms that Postling will become the one-stop social media aggregator for small business over the course of the coming year.

 

Further Information

• http://www.examiner.com/article/postling-simply-managing-your-brand
• http://understandingmarketing.com/2011/03/09/postling-makes-managing-small-business-social-media-easy/"
• http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/02/postling-klout-yelp/

References

• A Look at Useful Sites for Entrepreneurs. (n.d.). Retrieved from The Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704774604576036260244167854.html 
• Economist. (2012, June 2). Morals and the machine. 15. Manage Your Social Media Efforts: Review of Postling. (n.d.). Retrieved from Small Business Trends: http://smallbiztrends.com/2011/07/review-of-postling.html/ 
• Postling - Simply Managing Your Brand. (n.d.). Retrieved from Examiner: http://www.examiner.com/article/postling-simply-managing-your-brand Postling Makes Managing Small Business Social Media Easy. (n.d.). Retrieved from Understanding Marketing : http://understandingmarketing.com/2011/03/09/postling-makes-managing-small-business-social-media-easy/ 
• Postling Makes Small Business Social Media Easy. (n.d.). Retrieved from Ezine @rticles: http://ezinearticles.com/?
• Postling-Makes-Small-Business-Social-Media-Easy&id=5320300 
• Postling Raises Another $350,000 To Grow Its Marketing Dashboard For Small Businesses. (n.d.). Retrieved from Tech Crunch : http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/20/postling-raises-another-350k-via-angelist/ 
• Postling Rolls Out New "Suggestion" Features To Help Small Biz Owners Master Social Media. (n.d.). Retrieved from Tech Crunch : http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/02/postling-klout-yelp/ 
• Practical and Profitable Social Media Strategies & Training. (n.d.). Retrieved from KnowTECH Training : http://knowtechtraining.wordpress.com/its-what-i-think-about/page/2/ 
• Review: Postling for Social Media Management. (n.d.). Retrieved from Saz Bean : http://sazbean.com/2010/09/27/review-postling-for-social-media-management/ 
• Strength to Strength for Postling in 2011 So Far. (n.d.). Retrieved from Eton Digital : http://www.etondigital.com/strength-to-strength-for-postling-in-2011-so-far/