Mediafeedia Offers Content Management For Facebook

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If Facebook is the most important social network for your business, and you operate multiple business pages there, Mediafeedia wants to be your content management system.

After launching its product in October, Mediafeedia recently announced an enterprise edition and has signed such large customers as HDNet, which is currently using it to manage posts to the main HDNet page on Facebook, as well as the Inside MMA page for mixed martial arts fans. The web-based Mediafeedia service connects to Facebook through its application programming interfaces and allows users to post directly to Facebook pages or schedule posts to be published later.

HDNet social media director Tim Glomb said he values the approval process, which allows him to assign multiple people to create posts and then review them a batch at a time. "Instead of having to go to ten different people, and do the approval ten different times, I can just see what everyone has done, approve it, and let it go," he said.

Other social publishing products such as HootSuite support multiple social networks, but Mediafeedia wants to distinguish itself with its singular focus on Facebook, said Justin VanBogart, one of the cofounders. While the ability to publish the same content to multiple social networks sounds like a convenience, it's a mistake to overlook the unique qualities of Facebook, he said in an interview.

"If you're posting to Facebook the same way you're doing it on Twitter, frankly, you're doing it wrong," he said.

Many of the other social publishing tools were originally built around the features and limitations of Twitter and added Facebook support as an afterthought, VanBogart said. "Instead of being mediocre at everything, we wanted to be the strongest as one for Facebook."

In addition to publishing features, Mediafeedia offers Facebook monitoring services for large organizations. Although Facebook will send email notifications each time a comment is posted to a page, monitoring all that manually could be overwhelming for a big brand, VanBogart said. The Mediafeedia service will produce digest versions of those notifications for routine activity on a high-traffic page and send special alerts based on keyword filters, he said.

Mediafeedia started out targeting the kind of small businesses and startups that are typically customers of Constant Contact and MailChimp for email marketing, VanBogart said, but soon began attracting enterprise customers as well. So far, the main feature that distinguishes the enterprise edition is that posts are not labeled as posted via Mediafeedia (instead featuring the enterprise's own branding). Additional features requested by enterprise customers will follow, he said.

Free in its beta release, Mediafeedia is preparing to introduce a pro edition with additional page tab management features priced at $9 to $39 per month. The enterprise edition is priced at $199 to $3,000 a month, based on company size and page traffic volume. Even at the high end of that range, which he expects few customers to pay, VanBogart said his pricing will be less than half what his major competitor Vitrue charges. Vitrue, another Facebook-centric social media management product, did not respond to a request to fact check its pricing, which VanBogart pegged at $7,500 per month.

HDNet's Glomb said he also works with Vitrue, which is licensed by the Dallas Mavericks, a sister organization under the ownership of billionaire Mark Cuban. While the reporting capabilities of Vitrue are superior, the product has a user interface only an accountant could love, Glomb said, whereas Mediafeedia is much more usable.

Because most of the content HDNet publishes includes a video clip, Facebook is also a more natural fit than Twitter, which is built around text messages and links rather than multimedia, Glomb said. By extension, that means a product like Mediafeedia that is centered on Facebook is a better match for HDNet's needs.

"The fact that they're homed in straight to Facebook means we know they're not going to get distracted," he said. "Also, because they're younger, they're a little more hungry and, for us, a little more nimble."

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