VerticalResponse Acquires Roost

VerticalResponse, a provider of self-service marketing solutions for small businesses including email marketing, online surveys, and direct mail marketing, today announced its acquisition of Roost, a privately held social media marketing technology company based in San Francisco. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Effective immediately, VerticalResponse users can now sign up to create, schedule, manage, and measure their social media marketing campaigns from one convenient dashboard. The service is free.

"This is the first acquisition for VerticalResponse in the nearly 11 years we've been in business, so it's a truly exciting time for us," said Janine Popick, VerticalResponse's CEO. "The number of our customers who share their email marketing campaigns with their social networks has increased over 1,400 percent since the beginning of 2011, so it's clear that small businesses understand the power of social media. Now with Roost's social media marketing tools, they can take their customer engagement efforts to the next level."

Roost's proprietary technology enables users to do the following:

• Create, schedule, and publish Facebook and Twitter campaigns from one place, in just 20 minutes per week.
• Choose what to share from free suggested content, solving the problem of "What to post?" Libraries of suggested content are based on the user's industry, ranging from hospitality to real estate, as well as interests, such as health, entertainment or technology.
• Create custom content calendars for higher audience engagement.
• Get unique scores based on social engagement to see how well campaigns are resonating with followers.

"We couldn't have asked for a better, more complementary partner than VerticalResponse," said Alex Chang, Roost's CEO. "We built Roost with the simple goal of making social media marketing easy for small businesses. VerticalResponse is all about helping small businesses succeed through smart, affordable marketing. By joining forces, we aim to provide the most comprehensive suite of marketing tools that they can start using right away."

Following the acquisition, Chang will serve as vice president of Social Platform at VerticalResponse. Roost employees will fill various positions within the VerticalResponse organization and focus on growing social media marketing for small businesses.

In the coming months, VerticalResponse plans to announce the following:

• New, deeper integration between social media and email marketing, all from one interface.
• Even more robust reporting to measure performance.
• New features to listen, monitor and respond to audiences.
• The inclusion of more social networks.

"We treat our email promotions like events, in the sense that we try to build a lot of social media activity around them," said Peter Dziedzic<, owner of skoah Boston, a skin care company and spa. The company currently manages its email marketing campaigns through VerticalResponse and uses Roost for all planned social media communications. "Being able to launch an email promotion and pre-plan our social media efforts around it, all at once from one platform, will make things so much easier."

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