Quick Pitch: MarketMeSuite is a social media marketing dashboard that allows businesses and teams to manage their social media.
Genius Idea: Actively engage followers and turn them into customers for your company or business.
Tammy Kahn Fennell and her dad were small business owners selling collectibles in New York, when she realized interacting and engaging with the community are key to a successful business.
To help fellow businesses advance in this area, Fennell and her friend Alan Hamlyn developed MarketMeSuite - a free social media marketing dashboard that lets users manage their marketing campaigns on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The cross-platform application promotes user engagement, conversations and interactions with social communities.
"Social media is the cheapest way to promote your business, but it won't be a beneficial strategy if you are not using the right tools," says Fennell, CEO of MarketMeSuite. "MarketMeSuite helps businesses use social media to improve engagement and actually have a return on their investments."
MarketMeSuite has marketing features that make it easy to manage all of your social websites in one dashboard, including:
Scheduled Updates: Schedule as many tweets or Facebook posts as you'd like throughout the day (this can also be done on an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android device).
Multiple Profiles: Post to Twitter, Facebook (including groups and pages) and LinkedIn in one dashboard.
Location Targeting: Connect with people in your area to build local connections.
Klout Score: Watch your score increase with the Klout integration on MarketMeSuite.
Ping.fm: MarketMeSuite lets you post to your Ping.fm account.
To get started with MarketMeSuite, users have to download the application to their desktop and add their Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. MarketMeSuite then extracts all of your account information from these sites to help you begin designing social media campaigns for your business.
The MarketMeSuite team is testing other social networks to possibly add to the dashboard, including Google+, which only recently became available to third-party apps. Yet Google's fledgling social network still lacks a completely reliable third-party tool for posting to it.
One alternative to MarketMeSuite, HootSuite, has already added Google+ integration -- although in Mashable's own use has not always worked properly. HootSuite also lets users post to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. MarketMeSuite will also face tough competition with HootSuite, which announced last summer that it had surpassed 2 million users.
MarketMeSuite raised $200,000 in funding and added 10,000 users in just four weeks. Now with up to 15,000 users, MarketMeSuite is attracting businesses that want multiple user accounts without paying any fees, but it's still a ways behind Hootsuite.
Statistics show MarketMeSuite users typically show 25% of increase in traffic to their business after using the marketing tool for one month.
"We hope businesses that use our website will gain a unique social skill set that will allow them to curate social leads," says Fennell.
Version 4 of MarketMeSuite, which will take the application even further, is expected to be released in the coming months. The new version will enable users to curate their followers by location, network and team member, and manage and filter Facebook and Twitter feeds through a "Social Inbox."
Fennell says the new version will "create an unbiased playground where all networks can be used for marketing" and cut through clutter to help users engage in the places most relevant to their businesses.
Image courtesy of MarketMeSuite, MarketMeSuite
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
