New Social Tools from iContact

Linc Wonham — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:30:00 GMT

Email marketing firm iContact has introduced the latest version in its growing line of social media marketing solutions. I Contact Social Tools gives small and medium-sized businesses a powerful and effective means to reach existing and new customers through social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

The upgraded version of iContact Social Tools builds on the foundation established earlier in the year when the company started blending email marketing and social media marketing into a single conversation focused on small business success. Following are a few of the expanded features and functionalities:

• Social Tools Tracking – Users can insert, edit and track Like and Tweet buttons in every message for recipients to easily share with their friends, colleagues or followers on Facebook and Twitter. This feature splits up the tracking of Likes and Tweets by source so marketers can see how the numbers break down across viewers coming in from Facebook posts, Twitter posts, direct email recipients and other third-party sources.

• Facebook Like Buttons – Contacts can now “like” a vendor’s emails from their inboxes to further extend their reach.

• Tweet Buttons – Users can add a tweet button and contacts can tweet from anywhere in the message.

“It is easy to share information with friends on Facebook,” says Chris Regalado, revenue manager for Miami’s Beacon Hotel, which uses Facebook to encourage fans and previous guests to sign-up for its email list and take advantage of promotions for future visits. “We have found that incorporating social media with email makes each approach more powerful, and helps us expand our marketing efforts and grow our brand awareness. iContact’s Social Media tools are very straightforward to use, and we can see great results in a short period of time.”

Let's Minggl: Social Interaction Uninterrupted

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:10:00 GMT

I'm not sure how much time is collectively spent on social media, but my guess is it has far surpassed the total man hours spent building the Great Wall of China. While I'm not exactly sure of that, it should go without saying that consumers (and Web professionals) are using social media for business and personal use and the time being spent in pure hours is truly phenomenal.

But what if you could shorten the amount of time you spend with social media while increasing your productivity? There are numerous tools on the market which ease the burden (namely time spent) of being so social, including Ping.fm, HelloTxt (which both consequently recently released added the ability to post to Facebook Pages) and now Minggl which came across our radar early this morning.

Minggl is what’s called a social interaction manager and their toolbar (that's right, not a Web-based app) makes it pretty easy to manage information, communication, and navigation across and independent of social networks. Minggl is a browser extension to Firefox and Internet Explorer and it adds a “relationship layer” across all your sites. Minggl features inlcude a consolidated friend list to merge friends from multiple networks, the Status Blaster which allows users to update their status across multiple social networks from one place, and the Minggl Stream (which appears in a sidebar of your browser) to keep you in the loop on activity such as messages, comments and status changes.

'Net Features : social tools

New Social Tools from iContact

Let's Minggl: Social Interaction Uninterrupted