Of Businesses and the Social Media Challenge
Business promotion on social media channels is a bit like fitting a square peg into a round hole. The heart of the problem is that, almost without exception, the giants of social media only added the business promotion component as an afterthought.
What this translates into is frustration. Communication is harder than it should be, at every step you must employ creative hacks just to make sure that you send the right message.
The Exception to the Rule
In this entire field of mishaps, LinkedIn looks like a glowing exception. It was built to support a professional network after all. But the good news stops here. While LinkedIn does offer a great deal in terms of business connections and B2B promotion, its limited scope soon becomes apparent when you try to reach a broader public, like, let's say, Facebook offers.
It looks like a real problem without an easy way out. So businesses continue to hack their way through and try to reach their user base. Sometimes they get successful, other times they get banned (Google+ was the main culprit here) and most of the times they fall short of succeeding.
Problem? There's a Startup for That.
And so the story goes. Someone's problems quite often means someone else's opportunity. Enter ShoutOr, a small startup with some big ambitions.
Their take on the problem is to create a separate module for business tools, which include the general information, job postings and promotions. They also some very ambitious plans to blend in some localized search, Google Maps integration, possibility to accept feedback from customers and highly customizable access settings and it looks like a winner.
Well, it would be great if that would be the whole story.
Startup? There's a Problem with That
ShoutOr's biggest weakness is the fact that, well, they're just getting started. All these tools sound great on paper until you realize that you also need a serious user base to make them work. The tools themselves could also use some improvement especially in regards to usability.
The way ShoutOr is dealing with this dilemma is kind of ingenious though. They basically don't tie up the use of their tools to the use of their network. This means that businesses are allowed to generate all this neat content on ShoutOr and then use it somewhere else. For the tools where that's not really a possibility, like polls and customer feedback they adopted the tried and tested approach of 3rd party login.
Why You Should Give ShoutOr a Try
This little network could very well be the next big thing going or just as easy it could be another of those startups nobody will remember one year from now. Either way it just makes sense to get in early and establish a presence. This way, if it does become successful you will suddenly have a big advantage over your competition.
[image error]
