Mediaboss Marketing

Fanbase Media, a new social media marketing startup which has been flying under the radar for over half a year, helps companies use Instagram for connecting with their customers. Despite the companys low profile its turnkey, self-serve solution wont launch until next week, in fact it has already attracted the interest of some bigger-name brands, including Michael Kors, Shape Magazine, and others which the company isnt allowed to publicly name.

Currently a bootstrapped team of three, the startup helps businesses create, manage and promote campaigns involving user-generated photos posted on Instagram. For example, a company might want to run a photo contest on Instagram, specifying that entrants tag their photos with a particular hashtag to qualify.

Fanbase Media then helps to aggregate those photos, which can be pulled into a businesss Facebook Tab page, mobile microsite, or another page on the companys own domain. For example, you can see this page on a Michael Kors website, which shows a Fanbase-managed photo contest which the fashion brand ran in February for Valentines Day. The company had asked users to tag their favorite things, using the hashtag #fallinginlovewith.

Explains Fanbase founder Michael Zsigmond, a lot of brands are starting to tap into user-generated content for marketing, and we realized that theres really no platform that made it really simple for a brand to tap into user-generated content on Instagram.

Thats not entirely true, of course. Fanbase will compete with a growing handful of companies offering Instagram marketing solutions, including but not limited to, recently fundedNitrogram, as well asOlapic, Statigram,Chute,Curalate, and others. But Fanbase Medias focus on photo campaigns specificallymay appeal to those looking for an end-to-end, targeted solution.

The company offers three pricing tiers, starting at $299/month for 100 approved photos, then $499/month for 500 photos, and custom pricing beyond that. In an online dashboard, businesses can view the photo entries, approve or deny them, comment, and share them back to social networks, or mobile or desktop websites. The campaigns also support features like user voting mechanisms, Facebook Like gating, embeddable widgets, and more. And tools to design the photo websites and contest pages are provided, too.

The company has been working on the platform over the past eight months, Zsigmond says, and they believe this is the direction social media marketing is headed. The first generation of social marketing platforms was really about helping brands manage the content they push out, and we think the next generation of social marketing platforms is helping brands tap into their audience for content, and then use that content for marketing results, he explains.

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Fanbase Media Debuts Its Social Marketing Platform For Instagram (And Maybe One Day, Vine)