Helping SMBs Gauge Social Media Marketing Reach

Small businesses have yet another tool at their disposal to leverage social media. This one, called Social Stats, allows users to see at a glance where their e-mail marketing messages have been shared socially, with what frequency, and to what degree of success.Social Stats is the latest offering from Constant Contact, a Waltham, Mass.-based company that delivers email marketing, event marketing, social media marketing, and online survey tools to SMBs. "All of our customers are small businesses," says Mark Schmulen, general manager of social media at Constant Contact. "Many of them have only one or two people handling their marketing initiatives, so they need tools that are super easy to use."

With Social Stats, small-business customers would log in to their Constant Contact account after sending an e-mail campaign and go to the "E-mail Details Page" to view social share data. The information is presented graphically, with pie charts that show how many people liked the e-mail newsletter, shared it, Tweeted it, and so forth (Facebook Likes and Shares, Twitter tweets, LinkedIn posts, and the number of additional e-mail page views generated through social media).

Constant Contact offers a number of other online marketing tools to its 350,000-plus small-business customers. One of those is NutshellMail, a free service that lets users manage all their social media accounts in one place and at one time. Once users link their social networking accounts, NutshellMail organizes and compiles data from all of those accounts and sends it in a single interactive e-mail "digest." Through that one e-mail, users can view and respond to Friend requests, messages, Wall posts, newsfeeds, Twitter lists, and other social site updates. "E-mail is still the killer app -- the hub of all communication -- for small businesses," Schmulen says.

Social Stats is available for a 60-day free trial.