Shoutlet Fires Off New Trigger-Based Social Marketing Platform

Here’s why social media marketing is broken: my company wants to launch a contest on our Facebook app and website and post about to all our fans and followers, post when we hit 1000 entries, and post again when the contest ends after 5000 entries. Sequencing like this was difficult because marketing team would have to monitor for those milestones to be reached, then manually rotate our apps and publish updates.

Social marketing platform Shoutlet today launches a way to turn the cacophony of disparate campaigns into a concerted push. It’s called Social Switchboard, it uses trigger-based campaign publishing, and your marketing department wants it.

Social Switchboard lets marketers schedule status updates, tweets, YouTube videos, emails, apps and more to be published when a trigger is hit, such as a Facebook Page reaching a certain Like count or a number of contest entries being submitted.

Shoutlet also has a new drag-and-drop application builder and an enhanced social CRM system for creating apps and choosing who to send marketing messages to. Next it’s building its own Ads API product that will leverage the CRM data and taps into Social Switchboard to launch ad campaigns alongside promotional apps and status updates.

When I interviewed Shoutlet in September, I worred it was wasting its $9.2 million in funding by offering a breadth of services widely available elsewhere. I recommended the company get serious about the Facebook Ads API which has proved a big money maker, and focus on differentiators to help it compete with Buddy Media, Vitrue, and other big social marketing platforms.

I’m not worried for Shoutlet anymore. At least not until other social marketing platforms wise up and add trigger-based campaign publishing too.

[Image Credit: redcmarketing]