uberall launches tool to influence consumers' buying decisions via social

World's first to use Facebook's API feature

uberall announced the launch of its local social engagement tool today, Engage. The tool enables businesses to make more sales by influencing local customers’ purchasing decisions at key moments in the sales cycle, and is one of the world's first tools to leverage the new offer feature of Facebook's API.

Engage empowers businesses to post across social media, review sites and directories for all their store locations, from directly within the uberall cloud. This also includes posting current offers to desired store location pages in Facebook. Businesses can now not only monitor mentions of their brand, but actively respond to customers and provide them with offers and discounts to generate sales across all store locations. As one of the first business tools to work with Facebook’s business offers feature, the tool also provides a natural end-user experience.

With customers shown to be influenceable in their choice of brand when researching a product or service, positive brand reviews and mentions are vital to sway customers' buying decisions. uberall already provided its clients with the ability to monitor their reputations online, and was extending its product offering in social posting capabilities - coinciding with Facebook’s offer feature was tremendous serendipity:

"Although we have had social monitoring features for a long time, we were very happy when Facebook announced that product offers would be available through the API. We were developing our social engagement tool further, to include a greater range of social media and review sites segmented by store location in the tool's capabilities, and we happened to be developing our tool at the same time Facebook was developing the offer feature of its API", said Co-Founder Florian Huebner. He continued: “Engage will really power our clients’ selling opportunities - since consumers’ buying decisions are not finalized in the research stage, they can be influenced by positive or negative reviews. We take this idea a major step forward enabling businesses to identify and target customers by location, and thereby influencing those consumers at the local level with positive responses to brand mentions.”

With responses to Engage highly positive among uberall’s clients who have tested the tool, the company announced the opening of its US office in the heart of the American tech and startup scene, in San Francisco. The office will enable the company to develop its presence in the US and provide American clients with direct access to uberall representatives. Co-Founder David Federhen said "working with US customers and key technology partners like Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft is very important to us. After lengthy consideration, we decided to move to San Francisco to increase our visibility in the American market, and showcase our game-changing local data and presence management solution - Engage is the thing that put the move over the top as it's an incredibly powerful tool combining data and social, with direct impacts on marketing and sales."

The new tool will enable businesses to:

• Monitor reviews and user-generated content of their businesses, and therefore understand perceptions of their brand.
• Respond directly to feedback and customer generated content from within uberall’s Local Management Cloud.
• Create content to be posted across social media channels and the rest of the uberall Listings Network, but also across all or individual locations, allowing tailored communication for each location.
• Schedule posts to publish at a future date and time across locations.
• Receive custom notifications for each new review or user-generated content, putting businesses in the driver’s seat when it comes to shaping their company’s online reputation.
• Analyze reviews and user content by location, time, platform, geography or type.
• Understand who their customers are for each location: Who shops in their stores, and who leaves reviews for every location.

The Local Management Cloud can already:

• Enable businesses to manage all their business location data from a single, innovative platform.
• Design customized store locators for companies to enhance their local search presence.
• Manage both basic address data and rich content like categories, business descriptions or images.
• Use the business information stored in the uberall cloud for in-house reporting, customer support tools and more.
• Understand and track the performance of all business locations across all uberall products in one single dashboard.
• Assign user roles to better control business data.