And then, there was a young and promising Startup. What do you think GetSocial stands for? GetSocial is all about the customers. And by that I don’t only mean the customers of GetSocial – but the customers of its customers. Too complicated?
The idea behind GetSocial is almost as simple as its usage and enjoyment. Let’s look back to the recent past for a bit. A few years ago social sharing became mandatory for every website (you have to have it, right?). But who’s tracking that? What does it mean? You can actually generate great insights through consumers’ sharing behaviour on your website. GetSocial is the unfair advantage for those who want to know more; who want to listen to what the customers are telling them through their behaviour.
Nowadays, the website doesn’t only represent you and your company anymore.
You can measure everything here – from the number of visitors to their engagement. Via Social Sharing Buttons, the consumers are allowed to share content with their social network. But are we able to see who is sharing what? No. Not even close. GetSocial allows you to track who shares your content. We are talking about their gender, name, location or contact information and how they’re driving your business. – João Romão
We would all agree that it’s becoming a trending topic and a need to identify the most influential users on the website. But how does their social influence affects your business? With GetSocial, it becomes less of an obstacle to track conversions, both in volume and revenue. This B2B Startup is an effective Social Media analytical tool. It´s no surprise that GetSocial is mainly aimed at Social Media experts. The biggest help so far has been provided to content (online newspapers) & e-commerce websites.
By signing in for GetSocial you generate traffic, and the chances to higher up your revenue grow as well. The main features of the service include customization and tracking of Social media buttons, user conversion and user influence analysis.
Up to this day, and thanks to GetSocial, more than 50 million users were tracked. Who has already figured out the benefits of this tool? Shopify, WordPress, Blogger.com or Tumblr are already on the list.
From Wishareit to GetSocial
But before all this there was another young and promising Startup. It was called Wishareit and it was GetSocial’s forerunner. Even though the idea behind Wishareit and GetSocial was not the same, they share the same developing team. Two years ago, 4 co-founders of GetSocial, including João Romão and Nuno Rochinha decided to run a company that would help people to find, recommend and receive perfect gifts from their family and friends. This Startup turned up to be unsustainable after a year of existence.
The upcoming question was – How to use the technologies that have already been developed for Wishareit in the most efficient way? How to bring it on to the B2B market and empower consumer websites?
“The biggest part of technologies we had was Social Sharing. It represented the simple way to share thoughts about the products. And instead of only liking and sharing, users were able to share their concrete thoughts of a product.“ – João Romão
After João and Nuno solved the deal with technologies, the story of GetSocial started to evolve. After they started to pitch GetSocial to some of Wishareit’s investors they ended up raising 630 000 euros in investments backed also by Portugal Ventures & Faber Ventures.
It may appear as a tough nut to crack, but GetSocial definitely knows either how to get the money or the name out there.
When we first launched, we focused mainly on outbound sales, we did a lot of research on online companies and relied on lead generation. We generated around 8000 contacts and one of the ways we used to „get our name out there“ was direct contact via LinkedIn. Now, we can afford to put ourselves more into content marketing, blogging or SEO. We are coming up with tools such as Whitepapers that we distribute mainly to smaller customers via perspective channels like LinkedIn.- João Romão
Future challenges
When you are entering B2B market, it can be often challenging to find the right target market and to position your product properly. GetSocial is obviously aimed at different segments that have different goals when using this service. João Romão admits that the perfect persona for them is a medium sized company. Many small companies would mistaken GetSocial for a traffic generator instead of a tool to track the behaviour of a user.
Currently, there are 715 businesses using the product, so it is more important than ever to clarify the basic idea of GetSocial. How can the product offer the most value to its customers? Finding the perfect market fit for a product is a run on a long track. The team’s agenda is to find answers to all the questions. They have been reaching customers and gathering the feedback, so they can soon establish the product’s roadmap. After putting all the effort together, in mid January 2015, there will be a new app – a new way for people or businesses to capture data of customers and a new tool to acquire data.
There are countless ways to connect with your customer. GetSocial is discovering the newer and more attractive ones. For instance, one of the results of a feedback from the customers showed that they would be happy to see the sharing buttons that would bring them some discounts when clicking on them. And the customer knows the best and is always right, isn’t he?
So, what’s in for the future? First of all, dozens of challenges. One of those is to prove that GetSocial is perceived as valuable and sufficient for a target market. The second one is to get the relevant number of paying users in order to keep rocking the science of customer’s behaviour on your website.
Want to know more about 5 things you can do with GetSocial? Check their blog!
Blogpost written in collaboration with Barbora Piatrová.