Brandr is a very honed solution that answers specific questions for a small business around social media.
I have bad news: you are not a social media pro. I know you fancy yourself as a Twitter savant, sending out daily bits of wisdom and wit in 140-character bursts, but the sad truth is your tweets are terrible. Like, so terrible I want to smash my phone on the cement and become a monk. Same goes for those Facebook posts about what kind of organic groceries you just bought, or the Instagram posts that have you gazing sullenly and seductively into a stream. There is countless social media in the world, but there are few pros.
On a similar note, there is a common theme when it comes to the world of social media and how it relates to small businesses: it’s hard to find time and resources to dedicate towards creating awesome, engaging content. This usually means that the process of running social media accounts for a small business — not just running, but churning out large amounts of quality, professional posts — is constantly pushed to the back burner, waiting for a time that never materializes. Here’s some good news to cancel out the bad news I gave you earlier: that time has finally arrived.
You already know the folks who brought Studio to the world, a social design app that appreciates the power of a good remix. Every good app demands good feedback and Studio’s founders kept hearing a common refrain: How can people use Studio’s technology to enhance their small business, specifically in regards to social media? From this question, Brandr emerged.
“We found that a lot of our Studio users were trying to make on-brand business posts because they were small business owners,” said Joe Wilson, CEO of Studio and Brandr. “Like most small business owners, they are out there finding whatever tool they can through Google to accomplish whatever goal they have five minutes to accomplish. That’s where Brandr comes into play. Brandr is a very honed solution that answers specific questions for a small business around social media. What do I post to social media? Is that working for me? What are they doing for my business? How can I do better with my limited amount of time as a small business owner?”
Brandr is built around a simple concept, providing small business owners with the tools to effectively create and manage social media content about their business. Small business owners lack the time to diddle around on Facebook all day, dreaming up snazzy things to post and cool pictures to take. Into that void steps Brandr, which allows any business to create, post, and track things on social media in a matter of seconds.
“Brandr solves the problem of content for small businesses,” Wilson said. “It offers tracking and insights to small businesses, things that are typically only available to larger companies paying a lot money to entities like Adobe Social or something like that. We’re trying to take all this knowledge that’s out there on how to be successful on social media and bring it into a product that has tools for a small business owner to — in a mobile environment — rapidly use.”
Much like Studio, Brandr has a design engine that allows users to upload logos and customize posts using a similar kind of framework. Any photo can be turned into a company photo with the simple click of a button, any post can easily be shaped into an engaging business post, and the time spent doing either is minimal, which is music to the ears of a small business owner.
A beta version was released in early 2015, a live version was released in mid-December of 2015, and the upcoming year now becomes concentrated on growth and adding features (Brandr currently works with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with Pinterest and Tumblr coming soon).
“It all comes down to our features,” said Wilson. “Brandr is full of thousands of proprietary social posts — think of it like stock content. So if you’re a restaurant owner, you come in to Brandr and say that your restaurant is food and beverage. Then we recommend content to share with your users, things that invite users to engage, things that ask users fun questions, things that encourage users to follow your business because they’re interested in your content. And we allow you to quickly brand that.”
In addition to providing the tools to quickly shape content, Brandr offers insights into how that content is doing. When you post something to Twitter or Facebook, Brandr tracks all the fun information that is paramount in the social media world — engagements, shares, potential impressions, that sort of thing. If you’re a small business owner posting things to social media, you want to know that your work isn’t falling on deaf ears. If it is, you know that a change in strategy is probably a smart move.
Brandr is hoping to engage small businesses in the exact same way Studio has engaged the general population. If this happens, small businesses won’t have to worry about employing social media pros, because that’s exactly what Brandr is.
“We had big companies come to us and say, ‘We’d love to use Studio technology’, and we had people saying, ‘I’d love to use my own logo with these design tools,’’ said Wilson. “So we built a product and rolled out a really sophisticated beta to all these people. What we found was, the small business owner was the one who was most motivated by this. They were the ones that didn’t already have resources to post on social media. Many of these small businesses said to us, ‘For the first time ever, I can use my logo to create something and share it with people. I don’t have time to learn Photoshop, I don’t know how to do it.’ And Brandr walks them right through that process.”
Published 2/3/2016
