A New York City startup that provides small businesses with a social media dashboard, Postling, is rolling out three new features this week. They are meant to help small business owners see who their company’s most influential advocates are on social media; and get actionable ideas from brands that are doing a good job of using social media already.
Using Klout’s reputation monitoring, Postling will now present users with information about their latest follower(s) on Twitter. If anyone highly influential — from Lady Gaga to Ron Conway — follows your company, Postling founder and chief executive David Lifson reasons, you may want to write a personalized thank you to them, and follow them back immediately— even if you don’t usually take the time to interact with every follower your business gains.
Klout and Postling share some investors, including: Thomas McInerny, Dave McClure and Paige Craig.
In addition, Postling will now alert business owners when a new, favorable — meaning four or five-star review — appears about their business on Yelp or Citysearch.
Finally, if Postling detects that a small business hasn’t shared anything on their blog or via social media profiles in a while, the app will offer some good ideas about what the company owner might do to get or keep the buzz going.
Lifson elaborated as to the reasons these features were a priority for Postling users:
“We hear a lot from SMBs that they ‘don’t know what to say,’ and ‘don’t know what to do.’ This is our way of leveraging the infrastructure we have and the data we have to go from a time-saving tool to something that can really make SMBs more effective.
Now, when you log in in the morning to Postling, we’ve got five or six different things lined up for you that we thought would be important things to bring to your attention.
We paired each thing with some action you can take based on the best practices we see among Postling’s users. About 19,400 businesses use Postling now. We’ll show you what they’re doing that works, like one of their Tweets that got a lot of retweets or replies, or a blog post that got a lot of comments, for inspiration…”
With five, full-time employees and nine consecutive months of 10 to 20 percent growth in users, Postling is also developing an iPhone and Android version of their web app.
[Update Jun. 2, 2011 6:30 PM ET]: Ron Williams, the founder and CEO BellTag, wrote to TechCrunch to inform us that Postling graduates from the First Growth Venture Network class of 2010. The company graduates tonight. Williams is on the incubator’s executive committee.
Congratulations Postling and all the graduating FGVN startups!