Com­pa­nies run­ning online social mar­ket­ing cam­paigns always like to know how their lat­est media dri­ves are going down; now they’ll be able to pull togeth­er all the most rel­e­vant met­rics they need to find out, thanks to the launch of Toron­to-based start­up Hel­lo Social. Can­ny social media man­agers and com­mu­ni­ty man­agers might like to keep an eye on this clever new kid on the block.

From oppor­tu­ni­ty to conversion

Co-found­ed by tech­ni­cal lead Bartek Nowatars­ki and design pro­fes­sion­al Dominik Dry­ja, the new com­pa­ny helps firms wish­ing to run con­tests on social plat­forms like Face­book (or their own web prop­er­ties), by pin­point­ing the trends and oppor­tu­ni­ties which will most like­ly lead to bet­ter engage­ment and high­er con­ver­sion rates.

Hel­lo Social uses its web-based plat­form (a Pho­to Con­test for Face­book) to cre­ate social pro­mo­tions in a sim­ple and intel­li­gent­ly mea­sur­able way. Com­pa­nies just need to name their con­test, and then select set­tings — like how many entries any one par­tic­i­pant can make, how many entries can win, whether par­tic­i­pants have to ‘Like’ their web­page to take part and when the con­test shuts.

A few steps to success

After assign­ing a short com­pa­ny descrip­tion, terms, reg­u­la­tions and pri­va­cy pol­i­cy (approved by the firm’s legal team), com­pa­nies sim­ply need to add an age gate.  Then they spec­i­fy what data they’re seek­ing to col­lect.  As vet­er­an com­mu­ni­ty man­agers and social media man­agers will be all too aware, social media con­tests are always about gen­er­at­ing leads for brands.  With Hel­lo Social, they can choose as many fields as they want, includ­ing name and email, as well as cus­tom fields rel­e­vant to the brand.  The final touch is to choose a design and to set the broad­cast mes­sage for friend invites and Open Graph, and the con­test is ready to roll.

As Dry­ja explains:

“We’re giv­ing the tools for Inter­net com­pa­nies to track very sim­ply whether he’s actu­al­ly an engaged user, whether he’s actu­al­ly rec­om­mend­ed some­thing, whether he’s a paid user, all com­ing soon in future releas­es. There’s no sys­tem right now that deliv­ers this kind of solu­tion, and we’d like to con­tin­ue in the future devel­op­ing things in that area.”

A flat fee of $199 is charge­able per cam­paign, fol­lowed by a recur­ring dai­ly rate of $4.99 through­out the contest’s run. Unlike com­peti­tor plat­forms, Dry­ja says, Hel­lo Social isn’t locked down to spe­cif­ic platforms.