Social media measurement platform Viralheat expands further into the page management and publishing space with its new Viralheat Free product announced today.
The tool is among the most comprehensive free offerings for cross-platform posting, conversation management and analytics. Viralheat co-founder and CEO Raj Kadam tells us his goal was to make a full-featured product available for small businesses and agencies to access the data they need to be successful with social media.
More and more, social marketing platforms are converging. Marketers do not want to have to switch between multiple tools or deal with paying for different services. Although each start-up has its specialty, most are finding that they need to build all-in-one solutions for marketers to be interested.
Viralheat began as a social media monitoring and analytics platform, similar to Radian6, Omniture or Scout Labs. Those platforms got acquired by larger companies — Salesforce, Adobe and Lithium, respectively. Now as those services focus on serving large enterprise, Viralheat has made an aggressive move for the SMB market by giving away a publishing tool and basic monitoring and analytics. The free product is complete enough to lure some customers away from other affordable platforms like Hootsuite and Sprout Social.
Free users can add up to seven accounts for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. They can track mentions and analytics, as well as create and schedule an unlimited number of posts. The tool seems to offer deeper analytics than Hootsuite provides in its free plan, though this matters more in relation to Twitter than Facebook because Facebook offers its own free insights about pages. When Viralheat users need to add more accounts, track more mentions or begin competitive analysis, they can move to a paid plan beginning at $ 49 per month.
Kadam says Viralheat is looking to add support for Pinterest in the near future.
Source: Inside Facebook
5th Planet Games announced today that their super hero-themed collectible card game (CCG) Legacy of Heroes is now free to play exclusively on Kongergate.com, a games portal purchased by brick-and-mortar video game retailer GameStop in 2010.
In Legacy of Heroes players start as freshmen in the Phaeton Project, a school for young super beings known as Emergents. Using strategic thinking and a little luck, players compete in head-to-head card battles to build up their decks. Players can also customize their decks, participate in league play, complete special missions and purchase booster packs
As Inside Social Games previously reported, 5th Planet Games found great success in expanding from Facebook to other platforms and games networks. After launching Clash of Dragons on Kongregate in December 2011, 5th Planet Games reported 300,000 installs in just 30 days, a company record they in large part credit to Kongregate’s handling the promotions.
Legacy of Heroes was written and illustrated by Brian David-Marshall, who’s written for Marvel and DC comics in the past. David-Marshall was Principal and Co-Founder of New York-based game design consulting company To Be Continued LLC when it was acquired by 5th Planet Games earlier this year.
CEO of Kongregate Jim Greer said that he’s excited to support the launch of Legacy of Heroes exclusively on Kongregate, noting 5th Planet Games has published some of the most successful games on the platform, with titles receiving more than 20 million gameplayes.
Source: Inside Social Games
As the web has grown and more B2B companies have expanded their online presences, they have had to deal with the notion of Amazon as a competitor. Not in the normal sense of competition for business, but competition for attention. B2B companies have also had to contend with the Amazon experience. No matter what your business, as soon as you migrate it to the web, your customers expect an experience like they get at Amazon. This means easy navigation, filtered browsing, robust search, recommended products, customer reviews, simple checkout and reliable shipping.
The launch of Amazon Supply brings more than 500,000 scientific, industrial and business products to customers the Amazon way. If your B2B company sells products in these categories, you are not just competing against the Amazon experience, but you are competing against Amazon themselves. This is going to be a frictionless process for many smaller customers, as they will be able to use their Amazon account and associated credit card to make their business purchases. This new business supports a line of credit as well, so if you are in the business of selling these kinds of products, it is time to understand what your competitive advantage is, and how you can leverage your customer relationships to maintain your business.
It is unlikely that you can compete with Amazon on price or shopping experience, so focus on your people and their experience in the various industries. AmazonSupply offers phone ordering, free shipping, technical product support and fax orders 24 hours a day. Wow, really? Faxes?
Social media can help support your existing customers and attract prospects if you create and share content that provides business value to your customers. Even though AmazonSupply has Twitter and Facebook profiles, it is unlikely that they will create a blog, hold webinars or distribute business ebooks (Kindle books excluded, of course) to help their customers solve their business problems. With products in such a broad array of categories (listed below), their content strategy would be too fragmented to be effective. It is likely that they will use social media to promote products and specials and handle customer service issues.
And rather than treating them like Amazon, treat them as you would any other competitor. Although if you have online initiatives that you have been holding off, now may be the time to get those moving. What are other things you can do to compete against AmazonSupply?
- Abrasives & Finishing
- Cutting Tools
- Fasteners
- Fleet & Vehicle Maintenance
- Hydraulics, Pneumatics & Plumbing
- Janitorial & Sanitation
- Lab & Scientific
- Material Handling
- Materials
- Occupational Health & Safety
- Office
- Power & Hand Tools
- Power Transmission
- Test, Measure & Inspect
Source: Social Media B2B
Two big announcements from Facebook to close out Monday, regarding advertising and Facebook Studio. First, the social network is calling upon some of the leading advertising executives for a think tank session at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France. Second, Facebook is introducing Facebook Studio Edge, a new program on the Facebook Studio site that updates agencies on Facebook’s latest products and best practices.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Source: AllFacebook
Developer Loot Drop ‘s new game Pettington Park is now available to play on Google+, arriving on the social network under Zynga’s publishing banner.
Pettington Park’s look and mechanics bear a resemblance to what Loot Drop originally planned for Cloudforest Expedition before the title was shelved by RockYou. Players assume the role of a dog or cat who is part of a larger force at war for control of a park. These characters are tasked with decorating a park with buildings, arcade cabinets and courts; the latter items provide soft currency rewards via their minigames based on popular genres like pachinko, tennis and match-3. In order to build these structures, players also have to harvest resources and fend off dogs hostile dogs/cats invading their territory.
There’s also a light player-versus-player element in the game that maps to its cats and dogs theme. Everything players do is assigned a point score and counted as part of an overall team score; every Wednesday, the total scores are compared and a winner is declared. No details have been revealed about what kind of bonus — if any — members of the winning team will receive.
Pettington Park marks two firsts for Loot Drop: Its first time creating a game for Google+ and its first time working with Zynga. A spokesperson from Zynga said the company had no comment about details of the relationship. Zynga has announced publishing deals for its own platform with Playdemic, Rebellion and Konami as well as with Sava Transmedia, Mob Science and Row Sham Bow. So far, Row Sham Bow is the only game to see the benefit of Zynga’s cross-promotion bar on Facebook. None of the developers currently have games on Zynga.com.
The game’s launch on Google+ seems a little odd; Zynga only has three of its own games on the platform so far and hasn’t made any other investments in it that we know of. Zynga’s interest seems especially curious given that fellow Google+ Games launch partner wooga is leaving the social network. Several developers we’ve spoken to over the past few months have expressed reluctance to join Google+ because there just aren’t enough users or social features for their taste yet. It’s also been nearly a year since Google+ launched its games platform, and there still haven’t been any publicly-reported traffic for its social games channel or custom social features that set it apart from Facebook. Taking all of that into account, it could be that Zynga is using Google+ as a proving ground for Pettington Park before it commits the resources for a larger launch.
As for developer Loot Drop, Pettington Park is its first ever Google+ game and its second game launch in as many months. May marked the first official launch for Loot Drop under publisher Ubisoft with Facebook game Ghost Recon Commander, a tie-in title that shares unlockable content with console game Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Ghost Recon Commander has only been live for a little over weeks and has yet to gain much traction on Facebook. The title was featured prominently, however, at Facebook’s App Center launch last week, which could give the game a lift for the month. On for future games, Loot Drop seems to be committed to the publisher-developer relationship despite the fallout from RockYou and Cloudforest Expedition last year; that game has yet to find a publisher after being shelved. Note that Cloudforest’s early concept drawings hint that the game had an awful lot in common with Zynga’s Adventure World.
Source: Inside Social Games
We’re excited to officially announce the launch of PageData Pro & Enterprise. Similar to our AppData active user tracking service for Facebook apps, PageData tracks likes and People Talking About This for millions of Facebook Pages.
Our PageData Pro service allows you to see historical views of Facebook Page growth and engagement from as early as 2009. Additionally, PageData can track post virality and engagement such as likes, comments and shares for a select group of pages.
PageData Pro provides a way to benchmark against competitors in terms of likes, engagement and virality in order for marketers to make successful strategic decisions on engaging their base. For analysts tracking the performance of brands and companies, PageData Pro provides actionable insights into these companies’ efforts to engage and reach Facebook users.
Subscribe to PageData Pro here. Or if you’d like a custom enterprise solution, contact Kieran Barr, our VP of Sales and Social Media Research, at Kieran.barr [at] insidenetwork [dot] com.
To kick things off, we’d like to invite you to celebrate the launch of PageData at Mars Bar in San Francisco, next Wednesday June 13th. RSVP here. We hope to see you there!
Source: Inside Social Games
