Managing a company’s social presence online is no small feat – and it’s even harder when a company has a small team of digital marketers running social campaigns for thousands of employees.
Enter PostBeyond, a Toronto-based startup that allows a company’s social team to send content to all of their employees, encouraging them to share it through personal social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Right now, most social teams just email out content to their employees and ask them to share it. But the problem with that is that marketers don’t have any control over what employees post, and it’s a lot of work to ask employees to email them first for approval, slowing everything down.
It’s a common enough problem – yet while others saw this as a challenge, PostBeyond co-founder Ivan Tsarynny and his team took it as an opportunity. In April 2013, he and his three co-founders launched PostBeyond’s platform, aiming to cater to both large and small companies.
That being said, PostBeyond is mostly targeting its platform towards companies with 500 employees or more, with some of its biggest clients being Starbucks, AllStream, and one of Canada’s top banks.
“We’re like an email client to a certain extent,” Tsarynny says. “Users see pre-approved content in a dashboard. It looks similar to Pinterest … There’s a tiled dashboard, and if they want to share something, they just touch a button, and it goes automatically to the network they want. We can see the results, how many people read it or commented on it, and what kind of engagement it got.”
He adds there are tools allowing the social team to filter out certain keywords, flagging drafts of social posts if they have those words in them. There’s also an option for gamification, allowing employees to rack up points for sharing content for netting comments and getting it reposted.
For some of PostBeyond’s customers, the goal is to boost their ROI by directing customers to sales blogs or similar campaigns. But for others, the goal is just to use social channels to boost engagement with consumers or to attract better talent. It really depends on the customer’s goals, Tsarynny says.
On Monday, PostBeyond announced it would be one of six startups joining MaRS Discovery District’s Jolt accelerator as part of its fourth cohort, picking up about $50,000 in funding by joining the program.
While the company is excited to be part of Jolt’s summer cohort, it has actually been working with MaRS since February – and the staff of 12 has been learning a lot, Tsarynny says. In fact, with help from MaRS advisors, PostBeyond was able to quadruple its sales in the space of a few months.
“Jolt means to us … it’s like a triple jet pack,” he says. He adds going forward, the company will be leveraging the accelerator’s resources and advisors to expand into the U.S.
Correction: A previous version of this post said PostBeyond worked with YouTube, but it works with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The post also indicated PostBeyond’s co-founders launched the business in September 2012, but it was actually April 2013. We regret the error.