Appbistro

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Fans, followers, and conversations are great, revenue is better.

This is the maxim that GroSocial 100% stands behind. That is why they have worked long and hard to build one of the most simple/easy-to-use/design-friendly Fan Page Tools available. And it delivers. Not only is Customizer (GroSocial’s Facebook Fan Page Tool) stuffed with all the bells & whistles to create engaging and high converting Pages but they’ve also baked into the product an analytic dashboard that tracks every action a user might experience within a Tab (everything from Page Views to who clicked on what and when etc.) What this really means??? Knowing what content, when the action occurred and how often is one step closer to better understanding what your customer’s behavior on Facebook and that much closer to tying this action to revenue.

We’re pleased to welcome GroSocial & Customizer to the marketplace. Setup your free account today. Special thanks to Kevin for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions below.

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How large is your customer base and how many clients do you serve? Currently serve over 15,000 customers include large brands, agencies and SMBs.

Verticals Focused on? Primarily B2C, product-focused SMBs. Some Large-scale Clients include: Nixon, Real Salt Lake, Blendtec and NuSkin.

Favorite use or example of client using Customizer to power a campaign? We’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of great business and brands on Facebook, but a few of our favorites include campaigns done for Radio Station Arrow 103.5, Deseret Book, Gensis PURE and ESPN 700 Radio.

So what is GroSocial? GroSocial develops social media marketing tools that enable small and medium-sized businesses to run contests, promotions, gather leads, and generate more revenue at affordable price points.  Specifically, GroSocial is the developer of Customizer, a web-based application that helps businesses easily create custom tabs for their Facebook pages.

Why and to what benefit would a small business owner gain from using GroSocial? Developing and designing custom Facebook tabs is tricky and expensive.  GroSocial offers a drag-and-drop editor complete with design tools that allow a small business with little-to-no design resources or expertise to create professional-grade Facebook tabs. The ultimate benefit of using GroSocial/Customizer is to grow your company’s audience on Facebook. Research has validated the claim that installing landing tabs, running promotions, and administering contests, and the like increase the likelihood of passive visitors actually “liking” a company’s Facebook page.  We facilitate that process by making extremely robust, involved features accessible to SMBs at a fraction of the cost of creating something custom. Our analytics dashboard (available within Customizer) allows users to track everything going on with their Facebook tabs.  Page views, tab views, form entries, sharing statistics, and more are tracked real-time via Customizer, giving our users the data they need to make better, more informed marketing decisions.

What can customers expect in the next 3-6 months from your product? Additional widgets.  Our Premium subscription tier is growing at a rate of about one new beefy widget every month.  Most recently, we’ve added a Facebook Send Button (which tracks who sends something to their friends on Facebook via your Facebook tabs and how many times they sent it), Viral Vote (which is our take on “Facemash” or “Hot or Not”–basically, a comparative voting feature with promotion capabilities baked into it), and in approximately one week, we will be releasing a Photo Contest widget as part of our Premium offering.  The list of cool, innovative features continues to grow.  Our goal is to commoditize social media marketing–in other words, we’re taking expensive, difficult-to-develop Facebook marketing applications and making them inexpensive and automatable via our Customizer platform.  In 3-6 months, this list will include the industry’s most comprehensive list of features/functionality.

What trends are you predicting for the fall/holiday shopping season?  Any special sweepstakes we should know about? We’re already seeing an intense demand for photo contest capabilities.  As friends and family get together during the holidays, pictures are almost always taken.  Playing on what people do in their everyday lives–particularly their everyday lives during the holidays–is a smart move.  It lowers the barriers to entry for any promotion(s) you may want to run on your Facebook page.

What do you think of the latest product changes on Facebook: timeline, news feed, real-time ticker?  How will these changes alter/influence your product for brands and marketers? We like the changes.  We think that it presents new challenges and opportunities to a business like ours.  Our team is already hard at work developing additional features within our Customizer platform that will enable our users to take advantage of the changes that Facebook has made and is still making by allowing businesses to connect with consumers more directly and more frequently via the Timeline.

Anything special/unique/out of the ordinary that you want to share with the Appbistro audience? More than anything, we want to be clear that our goal is to make social media marketing easy.  Everything we develop and add to our Customizer platform is done in a way that is tested over and over again to ensure that the products and features are dead simple to use.  Further, we are trying to find ways for small businesses to scalably create Facebook tabs and promotion/contest types that are extremely complex, expensive to develop and deploy if done custom or in-house, and making them easy to create and extremely affordable if done via Customizer.