Roost has “pivoted” twice (banish the word). First it went from being a consumer real estate destination to a marketing platform for realtors. Then the prolonged housing recession caused the company last year to reinvent itself more fully. Roost is now a social media marketing tool for SMBs irrespective of their profession or category.
Yesterday Roost announced a new, free Facebook visibility tool, the Roost “Scorecard.” Not unlike some of the local search/SEO visibility offerings in the market from Palore, GetListed, Yext, Marchex, Vendasta and others, it shows SMBs (or national-locals) a “local coverage index” score that indicates strength or visibility on Facebook, but in particular geographic markets.
After signing up for Roost, users select their desired Facebook Page (if there are more than one), business category and zip code.
You then get your local coverage score, which serves as a kind of benchmark — for you to improve upon using the Roost set of tools, which also help you build your network.
Beyond this Roost is a social media management and publishing platform that seeks to build “best practices” into the structure of the tool itself. It tries in this way to help SMBs with the “now what problem” — what to do after setting up a Facebook Page or Twitter account.
It’s hard to understand this idea without using Roost. But below are a few screens that will convey a partial sense of what I’m talking about.
In this case, I’m building a post that shows up on Twitter but could equally be on Facebook. I select the account, schedule the post, pick the form or content of the post and publish:
Why not just do this on Twitter? It’s simpler, right?
The idea here is that you have a single dashboard to manage your social media communications (and grow your fans/followers) and campaigns. You can also schedule updates, which you can’t do on Facebook or Twitter. Users also get a range of analytics. It’s an almost unique tool.
The challenge of course, as with reputation management, is getting SMBs on to the platform and to use it. I suspect we’ll see an “enterprise version” coming at some point in the near future.
June 22nd, 2011 at 8:14 pm
Sounds very similar to Klout especially with the scoring and all. Would it be different because they are focusing on the SMB Market?
June 22nd, 2011 at 8:44 pm
Similar but the focus is different. Whereas Klout is focused on scoring influences — who should I pay attention to? — this is focused on the company or SMB and showing them their visibility in a given market.
June 23rd, 2011 at 2:53 am
Thanks for the great write up Greg! Couple quick comments:
- Really one pivot. From b2c to b2b social platform. We just phased the roll out of that platform starting with Real Estate since we knew that market
- There are a couple other things that I think make Roost unique, and especially helpful to SMB’s. a) We help with a robust content library based on your industry, and also make suggestions around different types of posts. Both to try to help busy SMB’s get started easily without being social marketing experts. b) Roost Circles is a very cool way to join forces with other businesses to amplify the reach of your campaigns
Lastly I’ll point out that the users who really get the most utility out of our product are creating campaigns across both Facebook and Twitter (with more to come).
June 23rd, 2011 at 2:59 am
Thanks for the additional color and information Alex
June 30th, 2011 at 8:58 pm
[...] See related: Roost Creates Local Visibility “Scorecard” for Facebook [...]
August 3rd, 2011 at 1:15 am
[...] is based on the Roost “Scorecard” analysis of approximately 800 SMB Facebook Pages. Below is mine, showing that 13% of my fans [...]
August 5th, 2011 at 11:46 am
[...] is based on the Roost “Scorecard” analysis of approximately 800 SMB Facebook Pages. Below is mine, showing that 13% of my fans are [...]