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This is terrific news for all our customers because it means that we’ll soon be able to provide an even easier and smarter way to do all your relationship marketing from one place.  After all, Email & Social Media marketing, while different  are clearly siblings of the same marketing strategy.  Why should you have to maintain relationships with your customers on email with no leverage from what you do on the Social Web?  Well, guess what, now you won’t have to.

We’re very excited about our plans to create an affordable, one-stop marketing service for small businesses and non-profits. And we’re very proud to be Vertical Response’s first acquisition.

Don’t worry, the Roost team you’ve come to know has joined the VerticalResponse family so you’ll still know who to reach out to if you have questions!

Stay tuned for some really exciting new product announcements over the next few months and in the meantime, take a spin over to VR to test drive some of their great products!

Alex Chang
Vice President, Social Platform
Former CEO of Roost

Created by: Masters Degree Online

But due to Roost’s unique position in the marketplace, we have access to data that can can start to paint a picture of the social marketing landscape of SMB’s. For this particular data report we set out to answer the following questions:

• Which small businesses are doing the best job of building their Social audience?
• Which small business industries are most and least active in social marketing?
  
• Who is achieving the highest amount of “signal to noise”?
  

We’d love to hear your feedback and find out if your industry and individual use is in line with our findings. Click on the document below to view the entire report.

Roost Q4 Data Series – “Measuring the Signal to Noise by Industry”

Each week we will put out at least one video (sometimes we will do more) dealing with some social topic. You will be able to find the here on on blog, on our Vimeo Channel or on our Facebook Page. We hope you will find these fun an informative. For your viewing pleasure, we have dropped our first four below. Let us know what you think.

In 1926, World War I Veteran Roy H. Long opened a real estate shop amid the desert terrain of Tuscon. As the region grew in population and opportunity, Long in turn, became an iconic American businessman.

Long Realty flourished and expanded. Today, Long Realty Company is the leading real estate brokerage company operating in southern Arizona with more than 1,300 licensed real estate associates in 37 offices, including 23 affiliate realty and property management companies that are independently owned and operated throughout Arizona and into Mexico. Long Realty Company is a part of HomeServices of America, a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate.

Roy H. Long’s philosophy was steeped in staying close to the customer, and 85 years later, the credo remains entact as the company takes on the terrain of the digital sort.

Today the firm boasts one of the most sophisticated social media initiatives in the real estate business.

In addition to offering its agents extensive, hands-on training and marketing consultation, the company relies on free social marketing platform Roost to streamline its strategic social media efforts.

165 Long Realty agents use Roost’s social media management tool to painlessly plan their customer outreach, with the end-goal of driving traffic to their websites and building better relationships with their customers. Usage of Roost is still increasing inside the company and Long Realty even uses Roost to help manage its corporate and brand social media efforts.

“Facebook is one of the top traffic referrers to our site, so it’s critical that we are consistent in our social media efforts and maintain a steady cadence of content,” said Kevin Kaplan, VP of Marketing and Technology for Long Realty Company.
“Our outreach was not conistent before using Roost. But now we can quickly and easily plan out what we want to post for the week. Whereas before, if you were busy, four days would go by and no posts would get done.”

Kaplan adds that the firm’s real estate agents turn to Roost’s Suggested Content feature to ease the burden of determining what to post.

“Agents really love the suggested content aspect of the platform. It’s very easy to find relevant information to post and so much of the work is done for you. It’s far less complicated now.”

The Roost tool not only is a convenience for agents but it creates new levels of productivity.

“If you know anything about real estate agents, you know that they’re constantly on the go and their daily schedules can change dramatically and quickly,” says Kaplan. “That makes it hard to plan out meaningful and consistent social media efforts. Roost fills an important void. Roost helps our agents to create and share a balanced campaign of social media content.”

“As an example, using Roost, an agent can schedule out a one week campaign for their Facebook business page in just a few minutes. I would say a typical agent using Roost can save up to one hour per week in productivity. Multiply that by the hundreds of Long Realty agents already using it, and that adds up to some serious time savings. Plus, it helps our agents reach out in an engaging way to develop new social relationships with potential clients,” adds Kaplan

As a real estate pioneer, Mr. Long would be proud that his trail-blazing ethos and commitment to the customer hold strong as the company he started 85 years ago faces yet another wild frontier, the social web.

The Roost Social Marketing Platform is the first social marketing tool of its kind to be offered to REALTORS®. This strategic alliance supports Roost’s and VAR’s mission to help as many REALTORS® as possible to painlessly engage in social media and attract more business while doing so.

“Social networking has become a useful and necessary tool for REALTORS® to generate leads and serve their clients. Many of our members are in need of quality training and tools to utilize these new platforms,” said Steve Daley, Director of Marketing & Communications for VAR. “In partnering with Roost, we are now able to help VAR members understand how to use social networking, and easily execute on what they’ve learned.”

“We’re thrilled to be chosen as the Social Marketing Platform for an organization as important, impactful and forward- thinking as VAR. This partnership will give VAR Members a critical edge in one of the most important frontiers for reaching the next generation of buyers and sellers – the Social Web,” said Alex Chang, CEO of Roost. “Not only will members receive critical training and help, but also tools to leverage that knowledge and be more productive via the unique and powerful Roost platform.”

As part of the relationship, the Roost Social Marketing Platform will be featured as an essential and easy- to- use tool for sharing and managing the regular publishing of information on REALTORS®’ social networking sites.

A free version of the Roost Social Marketing Platform helps professionals plan their social marketing activities in less than 20 minutes per week and is compatible with Facebook and Twitter, with other networks coming soon. There is also a premium version that VAR members are able to access by visiting www.roost.com/var.

About VIRGINIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®

The Virginia Association of REALTORS® (VAR) is the business advocate for real estate professionals in Virginia. VAR represents more than 29,000 REALTORS® active in all phases of real estate brokerage, management, development and appraisal. Our mission is to enhance our membership’s ability to achieve business success.

About Roost

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Roost is a new social marketing platform that helps small businesses and independent professionals manage their social presence and engage with their customers across key social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Roost has more than 20,000 real estate professionals and over 100 companies using its social products. The company is venture capital funded by Shasta Ventures and General Catalyst. Turn social into business at http://www.roost.com.

Not All Posts Are Created Equal

The Roost social marketing platform for small businesses provides impression and engagement metrics beyond the standard Likes, Comments, Shares and Retweets. Roost takes a deeper look at the various types of posts for each platform and determines which ones yield the highest levels of interaction amongst local business fans and followers.

Photos Rule on Facebook

The two greatest engagement tactics on Facebook are Likes and Comments, with Likes leading the charge. We found that the best way to achieve Likes is through photo posts, quotes and status updates, with photos providing 50 percent more impressions on average than any other post type and quotes providing 22 percent more interactions when compared to all post types.

Findings also show that questions generate almost two times as many comments as any other post type. The second most popular way to get fans commenting is through a compelling business status update. Facebook Shares are a great way to disseminate business and product messages across fans’ networks and links are 87 percent more likely to be shared than any other post type.

Quotes Rule on Twitter

Our report found that the most effective engagements for local businesses communicating on Twitter are Retweets. Quotes drive, on average, 54 percent more Retweets than any other type of Tweet, with status updates being the second highest driver of engagement.

“These results are telling for the small business community and provide direct guidance on how to achieve the highest level of engagement with their Facebook fans and Twitter followers,” said Alex Chang, CEO of Roost.  “By breaking down which post types drive engagement, Roost helps local businesses get more impressions on their social efforts and get their messages out in the most effective way possible.”

“Facebook is inherently visual, so it follows that photos would ignite more activity here, while twitter began, and largely remains text-driven, the home of the pithy soundbite, so it makes sense that quotes create the most engagement on that network,” added Chang.

The study was conducted in September of 2011 by analyzing Facebook and Twitter posts created on the Roost platform by over 8,000 small businesses across over 50 industries.

Our social marketing tool, available for free at http://www.roost.com/, helps local businesses and professionals easily plan and execute their social marketing activities in less than 20 minutes per week across Facebook and Twitter, with other networks coming soon. Additionally, any business or professional can run a free Roost Local Scorecard evaluation on their Facebook fanbase at http://www.roost.com/scorecard.

Terra Khachooni

Small businesses’s marketing needs are very different than say Macy’s or Wells Fargo. Their business is much more reliant on word-of-mouth marketing and referrals. At Roost, it has always been our focus to help SMB’s get the most out of Facebook, Twitter, and your blogs. Looking at how we “score” you through our Local Scorecard (http://roost.ae-labs.com/featured-posts/scorecard/?preview=true&preview_id=4737&preview_nonce=26c1dc9d89) by taking your city and population size into consideration, we take the essence of what an SMB needs to know… where are my followers located?

Roost determines engagement scores based on the number of times a post (or tweet, in the case of Twitter) is interacted with, including likes, shares, comments, and impressions for Facebook, and retweets for Twitter.

The social marketing company said it will add link conversions and hides to its mix soon.

Engagement scores of one through five are provided for each post or Tweet, and other data are provided, including number of views and type of interaction.

Roost also takes each brand’s size into account, the company says in a press release: “

A small business that has a Facebook page with 50 likes and receives five comments on a post is going to result in a fairly high engagement score. Whereas, five comments on a page with 10,000 likes will not fare as well.

This offering almost seems like a variation of Klout, targeted toward small businesses, but we suspect a score ranging from one to 100, such as those offered by Klout, would provide more insights than a one to five grade.

It’s possible the small range of scores could be due to the relative novelty of measuring engagement. And the company does more detailed grades in its Roost Local Scorecard tool.

Roost Chief Executive Officer Alex Chang said in a press release:

Businesses grapple every day with how to measure the effectiveness of their social marketing efforts, which is why Roost aims to provide all of the necessary tools to create, run, measure, and optimize social campaigns. We are excited about our new analytics engine, which gives users a consolidated view of their social activities and performance.

Readers, are you analyzing engagement rates on your Facebook page?

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