When we started Postling, one comment we heard from small business owners was, “I’m using social media, but it’s taking up way too much of my time.” As a result, we purpose-built Postling to allow small business owners, who have 100 other things to do each day, to manage their social media in 5 minutes a day. Another common comment we heard was, “I want to use social media, but I don’t know what to say and I don’t know what to do next.”

Today, we are proud to launch the Postling Suggestion Engine and our first three Suggestions to help small business owners get smarter and more effective at social media.

The three Suggestions we are launching with are:

1. Monitoring your Twitter account for new influential followers.
2. Alerting you when you get a new 4 or 5 star review on Yelp & CitySearch.
3. Showing you popular posts by other Postling members in your industry.

Our vision is to provide dozens of Suggestions, driving by algorithms or heuristics, that each have a recommended action tied to them, so that one day marketing with social media is as easy as running through the day’s Suggestions and triggering the ones that work for you.

Winning with Klout

For our first Suggestion, we’ve partnered with our friends at Klout to monitor who your new Twitter followers are and alert you when any of them are influential, according to Klout’s influence score. We then suggest that you reach out to this new follower and optionally follow them back. While it’d be ideal if you could say hi to every new follower, we know that you’re too busy. The smart compromise is to focus on the ones who carry the most influence, because those people are the ones who can make the most impact if you can convert them into vocal supporters.

Spread the love

There is a concept amongst social psychologists called social proof, which is the idea that people value something that is valued by other people. For example, crowded restaurants get more crowded and businesses thrive when celebrities endorse their products. With our second Suggestion, we’ll tell you when you get a new 4 or 5 star review on Yelp or CitySearch and encourage you to share that review on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. The idea is that a business should highlight the positive review to all of their fans as a form of social proof - if this person likes you so much, maybe others will as well!

Inspiration without perspiration

Ever sit down, stare at a blank screen, and suffer from writer’s block? To give you ideas, we’ve mined our database of 15 million blog posts, tweets, and FB messages to find the most popular posts by other Postling members in your industry. Maybe you get inspired to run a contest or share what your special of the day is. Whatever it may be, learn from the best! 

The future of social media tools

After years of using tools that seem to just give you an overwhelming (and unnecessary) amount of data, reports, and graphs, it’s time that social media tools actually start helping you get smarter and more effective. We believe Postling with Suggestions is the first in the industry to do so. While we are launching with three Suggestions, stay tuned for Suggestions specific to an industry, a geography, a media format, or even a time of day. With 15 million posts in our database and growing quickly, we have an incredible amount of data we can aggregate and mine to answer questions like “What’s the best time of day to publish a post for real estate agents vs. restaurants?” The future of social media tools is using collective intelligence, data mining, and disparate APIs to help everyday people get results they couldn’t get by using Facebook or Twitter or Wordpress alone.