Conversocial launches enterprise edition, ITV first customer

Conversocial is a real-time social media management system allowing companies to run marketing and customer support through Facebook Pages and Twitter. Today it launches an enterprise package focusing on large consumer and media brands which will let its customers manage large numbers of Pages and Twitter accounts, with individual user permissions, allowing customer support teams and moderators to work alongside marketing and PR departments. One of the first big customers is UK TV broadcaster ITV, which is in the process of rolling out Conversocial across all of their Facebook properties.

While competitors like coTweet, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Context Optional and Socialite also let you manage Facebook fan pages, Conversocial’s emphasis on enterprise tools somewhat mark it out from the pack. The startup was spun out of iPlatform, UK-based Facebook application development companies, set up by Conversocial CEO Joshua March and co-founder Dan Lester in 2008 and is now planning to set up offices in New York and San Francisco to further drive US sales.

The move is obvious for brands like ITV. A tonne of communication is shifting onto social media and companies are realising that they can be powerful marketing channels. Unfortunately the bigger you are on Facebook and Twitter the larger the inflow of comments and messages that need to monitored and attended to. Founder Joshua March told me “Since the Facebook platform launched, we’ve watched companies first experiment, and then shift huge budgets into social media marketing.”

People now expect replies on social media, ‘in public’ and in real time, however hard this is to achieve. Ignore or even delete something and a brand is dead meat. So marketing and customer support is happening in the same space at the same time.

Conversocial takes all interactions between users and companies on Facebook and Twitter and provides team workflow, marketing analysis and customer support tools.

Although it launched in July, Conversocial’s team edition now has 150 companies using it including Aviva, Tupperware, Tempero, eModeration, MediaCom and Wunderman. Further plans include CRM integration, automatic filtering for customer support tickets, and analysis of which content drives the most engagement from fans and followers.