Fancy setting up a Facebook page and social coupon campaign in five minutes?
As luck would have it, thruSocial can deliver just that.
The brainchild of Karel Baloun, the first senior engineer at Facebook, thruSocial and its free social couponing service, Thrupon, has been working its magic in the US of A since April 2010. And now it’s Australia’s and New Zealand’s turn thanks to local entrepreneurs Luke O’Neill and Megan Owen.
“We’ve brought thruSocial and Thrupons to Australia to enable local businesses to enter the burgeoning social marketing arena,” managing director O’Neill says.
“In the USA, thruSocial has over 19,000 businesses which have successfully built a combined 100,000 customised Facebook pages, and are using the Thrupons website to tailor their own promotions directly to their Facebook community as well as targeting new customers.”
According to O’Neill, businesses that forego Facebook risk irrelevance.
“Registering your business with Facebook is now as important as owning a business domain name.”
“Given Facebook has established a global member-base in excess of a 700 million, businesses that leave registering their business to the last minute may run the risk of not securing their preferred Facebook name.”
“Much like Yellow Pages was in the past where all businesses had to be in the book in some form, so it will be with Facebook were businesses will need to be found on Facebook or miss being ‘found’ by consumers.”
Technophobes rejoice. thruSocial requires very little nerdy know-how. If you can drag and drop, embed videos and copy links, you’re golden.
“thruSocial is an easy-to-use product that will appeal to businesses that want to create dynamic, customised Facebook pages.”
“But as Facebook and social media in general is new to most businesses we think the local on-the-ground support staff… will really appeal to Australian businesses.”
Local outfits have been quick to embrace thruSocial and feedback to date has been very positive, O’Neill says.
“Once businesses get started and realise that they can get sales and leads from customised Facebook pages they want to know and do more such as integrating products, ecommerce shopping carts, subscription tools etc.”
“We have also had new start-up businesses that have ditched their plans to build a website and are just using thruSocial to build customised Facebook pages.”
“[It] is cheaper, easier and more effective to get people to follow their business on Facebook than a website that is subject to the whims of Google search.”
thruSocial is a Facebook Preferred Developer, recommended by Facebook for social media projects. The Premier package also just so happens to be available to try for free for 30 days. It includes custom deals and coupons, unlimited widgets, PayPal, polling, Flash, plus custom HTML and Facebook comments.
