You can read more about our motivation for building Conversocial here.

Over the last few months, many of our customers have been using the beta version of Conversocial to help manage their fan pages. We already have several paying customers. Next week, we’re launching version 1 – the culmination of our work over the year, the feedback we’ve received, and what we’ve found is most important for our customers. We’ll be demoing it at Facebook for Business, an event organised by Tempero, one of Conversocial’s early customers. Numbers are limited – you can sign up here. If you don’t manage to come, don’t worry – get in touch and we can arrange a demo of Conversocial and a free trial.

Tempero will be discussing their moderation packages for Facebook, and we’ll also have a raft of speakers from integrated agencies, and Facebook themselves. We’ll be sharing some of our own internal research on what type of posts create the most real engagement, and sharing the results during the event (a blog post will come after!).

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By engaging properly with your fans in the feed, you build up their trust and interest in what you have to say – so when you have an application, or a video, or a new product you want to promote, they’ll listen; and if it’s good, they’ll share it with their friends. Without this trust, it doesn’t matter how many fans you have – they’re not listening.

Twitter has taken the lead in companies’ minds when it comes to having conversations with followers. It’s a great platform – and because conversation is the only thing you can do there, it’s easy to understand why companies have jumped into it. But, the great mass of your customers are on Facebook. The availability of the Facebook platform and engagement ads has meant that a lot of companies have focused purely on its potential as a broadcast medium – but the newsfeed and status updates were invented in Facebook first, and the amount of comments and engagement can dwarf what you get in other platforms. We believe that it’s time for companies to start really engaging and having conversations with their customers in Facebook. This is especially important for companies who have already invested in large pages with lots of fans (it’s likely that you have customers asking you questions right now, and you’re just ignoring them) but it’s also a powerful medium for all companies, big or small, to interact with their customers.

We want to help companies have these conversations, and manage them in an effective way. It can be difficult for companies to keep track of all the comments they are getting, especially if more than one person has responsibility for responding and engaging back. To help address these problems, we’ve been working on a new software as a service product, Conversocial. Conversocial pulls in every user interaction on your fan page or pages, and makes it easy to manage your responses and actions, individually or as a team, with tools to make your day to day management more efficient – including keyword tracking and email alerts for flagged content.

You can read more on what Conversocial can do here.

Conversocial is already being used, by numerous customers, to manage fan pages with almost 10 million fans between them. Over the past couple of months our early customers have been helping us test and scale. We have bold plans for where we want to take Conversocial, but we also believe in following an agile process – we release basic features early, and focus on learning what you actually find useful and use, and then use that knowledge to improve.

If you are managing your company’s fan page, and struggling to keep on top of what comments you’ve already read or responded to, Conversocial can help you right now. And if you’re not managing your page yet – you should be! Get in touch now.

The study, by Rice University, examined the dollar value of Facebook fans on the sales of the cafe chain Dessert Gallery (DG), by setting up a Facebook fan page and measuring the effect on customer behaviour between fans and non-fans. The page was updated regularly with pictures, news and promotions.

Over the three months of the study, the research found that customers who became a fan of Dessert Gallery on Facebook became more loyal throughout the period. Although they spent the same average amount of money in each visit as non-fans, they visited the cafe 20% more often and were more likely to recommend the cafe to friends, and showed a stronger emotional attachment to the company.

It’s possible that simply the act of publicly declaring themselves a fan created a positive feedback loop with how they felt about the company, and this had a real affect on sales and recommendations. This shows the potential for all brands in increasing their fan page activity, even on a most basic and simple level.

The iPlatform delivers marketing campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in finding out how we can help, get in touch now.

Working with Sports New Media, we created over one hundred Facebook fan pages for individual footballers on behalf of PFA. Altogether, these pages have attracted over 4 million fans so far.

On top of that, our competition platform is being used to run the official fans award Player of the Month competition, integrated across all of the fan pages. Through this competition, users can vote for their favourite football players and win:

• The chance to present the award to the winner at a home match
• An official framed photo of the presentation, signed by the player and certified by PFA Chief Gordon Taylor
• VIP Club hospitality, including two tickets to the appropriate game for each fan and their guests.

This is the only official football player awards voted for by the fans, and it offers the association a wide range of possible marketing campaigns aimed at their fan base.

We also help Sports New Media and the PFA manage the pages through our fan page management software, including automatic content distribution.

The iPlatform delivers marketing campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested, get in touch now.