Perch Helps You Track Social Activity For Your Business And Your Competitors

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The Perch mobile app is a free tool designed specifically for small business owners and managers. The app makes it possible for business owners to track reviews, social posts, images and promotions for their business and designated competitors, allowing them to continually and intuitively follow activity and assess their digital marketing performance.

Perch provides access the online activity of businesses across Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Google+, Instagram, Foursquare and hundreds of deal sites — all in one place. Over 100K local merchants have downloaded Perch to stay up to speed on social activity, listen to their local market and discover and improve their own social media and marketing activities.

Here is our recent interview with Perry Evans from Closely, the company that created Perch.

Q: Tell us your story and a little more about Perch?

A: At Closely, we’re creating an entirely new way for small business owners get a good handle on their digital marketing activities and product choices. We created Perch in response to a problem that exists for small business owners and the companies who are trying to promote their products to them. Small business find the plethora of digital products overwhelming, and are frustrated with the old school outbound sales models employed by hundreds of SMB-focused digital service providers. With nearly 2,500 startups on AngelList building products for small businesses, this problem is escalating out of control. Nobody has figured out how to better help the small business learn and discover the best digital services for them to focus on.

So, we’re bringing deep data and marketplace technologies to the forefront to reinvent how small businesses accomplish three goals – Watch, Learn and Discover. We save them time and capture their attention by consolidating their local market data into an everyday mobile app; we give them regular performance feedback, and, we use deep data techniques to help them find the right advice and discover best-of-breed products that fit their needs.

Q: Tell us something about Perch’s features? What are the biggest benefits for the users?

A: Perch is a single platform that makes it possible for business owners to track reviews, social posts, and promotions for their business as well as their competitors or companies of interest. A business does not know the Twitter, Yelp, Google+, Instagram, Foursquare and Facebook addresses of business neighbors and competitors. So, we’ve done a lot of data aggregation to provide a way of simply saying “this is me” and “watch these businesses.” Perch then auto creates a live everyday stream of all activities for the selected businesses. It’s like their local marketplace news feed.

Today’s consumers have an abundance of options when it comes to choosing among local businesses. When talking to small business owners, we found that they spend a significant amount of time running their own social media activities, keeping an eye on the competition and trying to keep up with constant change. Small businesses intuitively know that social media is a perfect fit to extend their word-of-mouth advertising. However, busy small business owners are often overwhelmed trying to stay on top of things. Plus, they’d much rather spend the time focused on their craft or trade.

The Perch app is both a time saver and a learning tool. Instead of randomly visiting the various social pages and offer sites for competitor activity, Perch combines all this into one feed that is continuously updated, with live notifications on review activity for their own business. Once the business owner or manager has chosen the businesses to watch, they can sit back and simply watch their phone to stay updated. In addition, a weekly or daily digest summarizes the most popular activity for them.

Additionally, when using Perch, the business owner or manager keeps an eye on their own digital word of mouth marketing. Perch points out which of their own social posts are most popular and even shows images that were posted to Instagram from their location. Responding to reviews, sharing reviews to social networks, responding to customer comments or joining an Instagram conversation linked to their business can easily be initiated from Perch. We link directly from Perch into the apps of all of these channels, so they can click and join the conversation or respond to a question or problem.

Q: What are your plans for the next six months?

A: Converting performance data into the right insights that connect to learning and action is our continual improvement focus. Business owners are hungry to learn and improve, and we’re actively working on features that help the small business even better understand what’s working for their own business and where there are opportunities for improvement. We want to help business owners stay focused on their core business while making continual iterative improvements to their digital marketing efforts that will help them smartly grow their business.

Q: Why should our readers start using Perch?

A: Quite simply, Perch saves you time and provides daily inspiration for how you can better engage with your consumers. Everyone can benefit from insights and because Perch does the work for you and brings all social posts, reviews and promotions activity right to your phone, users can immediately take action and engage their consumers and prospects. And oh yes, it’s free!

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