Drug Company Facebook Pages Face Mass Extinction — Here’s Who to Blame

Jim Edwards, a former managing editor of Adweek, has covered drug marketing at Brandweek for four years, and is a former Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University’s business and journalism schools.

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Social Media Marketing Made Effective: Review of Roost

Small Business Trends

• Social Media Marketing Made Effective: Review of Roost
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If you have ever asked yourself, “How can I get value out of my social media marketing activity?” then this review is for you. I’ve been searching for a comprehensive tool that would allow me to manage both Facebook and Twitter from one dashboard. Roost.com offers this functionality. It is a social marketing platform for small businesses.

Roost’s focus appears to be on real estate professionals right now, but I could see it easily working for just about any business. It is entirely geared around helping small businesses and individual professionals manage their social media marketing in less time.

Roost’s campaign creator curates content from your industry and interests. For example, they explain, “If you are a restaurant, you will be prompted to share articles from the food section of important newspapers or wine recommendations from prominent wine magazines.”  But if none of those work for you, add your own feeds, your blog or other websites that you like.

You can create your own Google+ style “circles” of employees, fellow business owners or other key contacts to share content and promote each other. This feature is new and in beta, but looks promising. They have built up some impressive momentum: Roost is used by over 30,000 small businesses across 50 verticals.

One of Roost’s most powerful features is available when you create a social campaign. When you click the “Create Campaign” button, it offers a customizable path of best practices to follow. It asks which account you want to post to and when (you can add more than one Facebook account or page, for example). When I tested it, Roost suggested I post nine items over the next five days.  That suggestion included two links, three status updates, one quote, two questions and one photo. I loved that it took the guesswork out of what I should do, but that I didn’t have to follow all of their suggestions, either.

What I really liked:

• I liked that Roost summarized my audience for me. I could see (image just below) where my fans/followers are located. Yes, I can do some of that in Facebook, but it is not easy, so I was glad to have Roost do it for me.

• On a busy day, you could pick from a list of links and Web stories that might appeal to your audience from already popular online media destinations. Roost pulls in a feed from each of the Web’s most popular sources and allows you to choose a story, and then post a comment about it (just like when you click the share or like button and comment from the Web).

What I would like to see:

The social media scorecard didn’t recognize the pages that I manage or own when I first selected them at signup. I wasn’t bothered by my low “rising star” score of 22, but even after checking my Facebook pages in the setup, it did not recognize them. I had to go through the authentication process twice.

Social media marketing can be a black hole for many small business owners. Roost can make it possible for you to manage your social media outreach with some consistency and with some hands-on advice. They offer a free “light” version; paid plans start at $24.90/mo.

Learn more about Roost.

From Small Business Trends

Social Media Marketing Made Effective: Review of Roost

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