Tiger Pistol, is launching version 2.0 of its platform aimed at making social media marketing easy for small businesses. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1 million in additional funding.
The company says that when customers sign up, Tiger Pistol can use information like the type of business, its location, and its status on Facebook to create step-by-step instructions on how the business should be promoting themselves. It includes the ability to schedule posts and ads, as well as guidelines on what kind of content should be included.
“The complexity in social marketing comes from companies not knowing what to post, when to post, whether they should advertise, how to advertise, when they should try and generate sales and what they should expect in return, and we’ve seen how much support they need,” co-founder and CEO Steve Hibberd told me in an email. “Their requirements are no different to big businesses, but they don’t have the thousands of dollars to hire experts or pay agencies.”
When I first wrote about the company last year, it was leaving its closed beta. Now Tiger Pistol says it has already worked with “thousands” of customers in more than 100 countries, and Hibberd told me the new version includes “unprecedented levels of smart automation and analytics.”
Behind the scenes, he said the company is using large amounts of data to determine what will and won’t work for its customers. He also noted that from existing customers, he’s learned that “small businesses want and need their unique personalities to come through”: “Templates and canned copy simply doesn’t work, but at the same time they need guidance on what to write, so it’s a fine balance.”
Tiger Pistol (the name comes from the tiger shrimp) previously raised $1 million in angel funding led by Australian investor David Solomon. The new funding comes from the new firm Rampersand and existing investors.