Mediafeedia provides Facebook marketing management tools for businesses of all sizes. The company was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in South Carolina.
SUB: How does mediafeedia work? What is the basic experience for the business end user?
VanBogart: By simply signing in with your Facebook account, mediafeedia users can manage multiple business pages on Facebook with a variety of tools. Users can post content in real-time, schedule out content for future delivery, receive Facebook page email notifications, share administrator responsibilities, and in the next few weeks will be able to create custom Facebook tabs that deliver incentives to social media followers!
SUB: Are your target customers just small-and-medium sized businesses or larger enterprises as well?
VanBogart: Right now, we are being used by professionals at small businesses all the way up to Fortune 500 companies. We’re excited to have support from a range of organizations, which shows how strong the need is for such a tool. We will eventually be coming out with an agency-specific tool that meets their specific needs, which we believe will optimize their Facebook marketing abilities for their clients, larger and small.
SUB: How many customers do you currently have?
VanBogart: We are currently working with nearly 1,500 active users and are powering content on over 4,000 Facebook business pages. Our Alexa rating puts us in the top 1.5 percent of all websites (89,000).
SUB: What is your business model? How do you make money?
VanBogart: Currently, mediafeedia is free while in beta and will continue to offer a free version for people to experiment with. We will eventually launch pro and agency levels of mediafeedia that will offer additional tools specific to an audience’s needs and generate revenue for our company. These will be priced competitively and offer easy-to-use tools that are worth the small investment. We will also be expanding our services to create custom tabs on Facebook to offer incentives to their audiences, which will also be an added service for a fee. Our goal is to become a user’s partner in managing their content, responding to fans, and helping grow their social media audiences. We believe Facebook is going to be a huge revenue driver for businesses and want to help companies leverage this social media platform to its fullest.
SUB: Who do you see as your primary competition?
VanBogart: We see Hootsuite and Tweetdeck as our primary competition.
SUB: How has the site been funded to this point? Have you raised outside funding? Do you plan to do so in the near future?
VanBogart: mediafeedia has raised 1.1 million in angel investment and is currently reviewing multiple other funding sources pertaining to our next round of funding. We do plan to raise additional capital to scale mediafeedia on a national and international level.
SUB: What differentiates Mediafeedia from the competition?
VanBogart: Our competitive advantage is that we have designed mediafeedia with Facebook, not Twitter, as our focus. This allows a much richer and user-friendly social media marketing experience to those whom use Facebook as their primary social media marketing vehicle. Brick and mortar B2C customers have slowly adapted to Twitter but primarily use Facebook. By designing this tool for Facebook, we’re able to help users deliver more meaningful content to their fans and help monitor and manage their pages in more relevant ways.
SUB: What have some of the challenges been to building the business so far?
VanBogart: 1.) Designing for Facebook is very challenging because it’s a constantly changing platform; 2.) Raising capital in a tumultuous climate; 3.) Switching the mediafeedia platform to Amazon Cloud was very challenging but was the right decision to ensure easy scalability; 4.) Did we mention raising capital in a very tumultuous climate?
SUB: Where do you see mediafeedia in roughly a year from now?
VanBogart: A thriving retail business (roughly 100,000 free users and 15-20% of them being paid). We’ve already taken the first steps in releasing the best of breed agency and white label solutions for tier 1 brands and agencies.
SUB: Finally, a question I always ask: as an entrepreneur who has weathered the down economy, what advice do you have for those just starting out—especially in an economy that remains less than dynamic?
VanBogart: Always believe. Stay focused. If you don’t have belief and focus neither will your users, customers or investors. Don’t be afraid to show passion and character in your marketing. The world is a social place now. People want to connect with other people not with commercials, so create meaningful content and be real.
mediafeedia – www.mediafeedia.com
