Hello Social is a new Toronto-based startup launching today, with the aim of improving the amount of useful data captured from online social media marketing campaigns. The startup, co-founded by design professional Dominik Dryja and technical lead Bartek Nowotarski, provides tools for companies looking to run campaigns like contests on platforms like Facebook, or via their own web properties, and provides intelligent metrics around those contests to help identify trends and opportunities to drive greater engagement and higher conversion rates.
At launch, Hello Social offers the ability to create one kind of social promotion campaign from its web-based platform, a Photo Contest for Facebook. Creating the contest is simple: you first name it, choose from a range of settings, including setting the number of entries allowed per participant, how many entries can win, whether users have to Like your page to participate, and when the contest closes, among others. You assign a brief description, contact details and terms and regulations/privacy policy (supplied by your own legal department) to make sure everything is on the up-and-up.
Then you set an age gate, and are able to specify what kind of data you want to collect. Contests are in all cases a way for brands to generate leads, so this is the crucial step. Contest creators can enter as many fields as they like, including things like name and email, as well as custom fields for gathering any kind of data. Then once you select a design and set the broadcast message for Open Graph and friend invites, you’re good to set it live.
“We’re giving the tools for Internet companies to track very simply whether he’s actually an engaged user, whether he’s actually recommended something, whether he’s a paid user, all coming soon in future releases” Dryja explained in an interview, talking about the range of possible options in terms of data you can gather. “There’s no system right now that delivers this kind of solution, and we’d like to continue in the future developing things in that area.”
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Through the API, developers have even more freedom in terms of what they can create, since they can build those same contests into their own landing pages, marketing web pages and existing online services. Contest participants can then access and engage with the same contest from multiple locations around the web, effectively making it a way to turn contests into essentially portable apps.
Hello Social charges a flat $199 fee per campaign, and then a recurring rate of $4.99 per day for the duration of the contest. This is in contrast to competitor platforms, Dryja says, which are locked down to specific platforms, or which charge different rates based on volume and business size. The whole idea behind Hello Social was to try to make the campaign creation process completely transparent, from pricing, to code, to results. The startup is currently bootstrapped, and Dryja says while they’re considering seeking outside funding, they haven’t made any decisions yet, and are already actually working with their first commercial partner on a major campaign launch.