Social Media Platform Feature: Fromote - A Social Advertising Platform

About the Platform

Fromote is a social advertising platform that helps people find someone else (with higher reach and authority) to promote their brand on social media. The advertisers can do targeted marketing by short listing influencers based on their association with the target audience of the brand. As Word of Mouth publicity has higher impact than paid ads, therefore influencer marketing campaigns get higher reach & impact at lower cost. It creates a win win solution as advertisers market their products to the right target audience and influencers monetize their popularity on social media & earn $$$ for each tweet / status update.

Fromote is founded by Sandesh Wadhwa and Jitesh Muchchal who hold qualifications like CA, CFA and MBA. They have total experience of 20 years among themselves and have been working together on various startups for the last 5 years.

Whom do we cater to?

Like any marketplace, we also have buyers (Advertisers) and sellers (Influencers and Celebrities) of social advertising. Anyone who wants to tap the audience present on social media is a potential buyer. On the other hand, anyone who enjoys the attention of the social media audience can be a potential seller on our platform.

Advertisers post their campaigns and influencers bid on them as per their niche area. Advertisers can also check influencers’ social media reach, target audience etc. They can also exchange messages with each other to fix the price and frequency of postings etc.

What do we offer to our consumers?

Many businesses advertise on social media but people are fed up of being marketed to, so they generally ignore paid ads. Therefore we are offering them an option of hiring social influencers to convey their message to the right target audience. It gives them higher RoI as compared to paid ads because recommendations from influencers appear as normal posts in the newsfeed of followers and have higher reach & impact.

On the other hand, there are lots of influencers who have large followers but no way to monetize their social media presence as they don’t know how to find advertisers for social marketing.

Fromote bridges this gap by bringing advertisers and influencers on a common platform, thus making it possible for an influencer to work with the brand he likes, and an advertiser to find influencers that suit his niche.

What motivated us to start up?

Like many other startups, we were also advertising online for our previous startup Group Bookings but soon realized that paid ads were guzzling lot of money and provided little results. We also spoke to digital marketing agencies but their charges were exorbitant. Therefore we started thinking about innovative ideas to promote our website. We did a test campaign with a friend who had lots of followers on facebook. We paid him just $10 (Rs. 600) for mentioning our website 3 times in a week and got good response. The traffic on our website more than doubled on the days he mentioned us and we also managed to close few deals.

It was then, that we realized the power of social media and did some research on it. We found that advertisements become INVISIBLE even when they are in front of your eyes! Whereas people are 4 times more likely to buy if recommended by someone they know. Therefore, we decided to build a platform where advertisers (even startups and other small businesses with limited budget) can directly search, contact, negotiate with and engage influencers to promote their business on social media. And Fromote was born!

What's in a name?

We were looking for something similar to the word “Promote” and zeroed in on Fromote! As p is replaced by f, sometimes people also ask us if it means promote on facebook but that’s just a coincidence!

How do we see Social Media?

We think that Social Media not only provides a way to connect with people but also a pool of audience waiting to be explored. While bigger players are bombarding this pool with ads, we feel that the trend will soon change in favor of the influencers and the advertising will evolve in following manner: Print > Radio > TV > Digital > Social > Influencers

Currently we are....

A fast growing startup! Many advertisers have already created many creative projects to promote their brands, websites, movies, music concerts, events etc. Some of the other advertisers we are talking to plan to use our platform for new product launches, discount promotion, viral content distribution etc.

Any person / page that has good fan following on social media and wants to monetize it can register as an Influencer. They can start earning by simply posting content about brands on their network. Many influencers have already registered on Fromote, taking its total reach to over 40 million. We are also getting celebrities influencers on board as they have huge reach and are preferred by brands

Our biggest challenge was..

Influencer marketing is relatively new concept in India and many advertisers are not aware that they can directly engage influencers to get better results. But we have seen repeat business from the advertisers who have used our platform earlier as they liked the response from this cost effective channel. Similarly Influencers, especially celebrities do not realize that they can easily monetize their social media reach. However, once they start using it, they realize its potential and get addicted to it! Therefore the challenge is to make advertisers and influencers aware that this possibility exists.

We want to dominate the world by..

Share what are your plans for the future w.r.t to your business and social media

1. Increasing the number of influencers and reach of our platform
2. Getting big budget advertisers on board
3. Reaching out to startups, small businesses and media agencies with special offers
4. Engaging Celebrities – Known celebrities are already promoting online but there are no avenues for others such as TV artists, who have huge fan following but limited or no brand endorsements at all.

We’re making moolah by...

An influencer can register and bid on advertising projects free of cost and advertisers can also post their projects free of cost (featured projects are chargeable). We work on a success fee model and deduct a small percentage from the influencers, only when they finally receive the payment from the advertiser.

Our What The **** Moment

A fashion startup, Kias posted a project on our website to promote its wedding collection. Womans Era, a leading magazine with reach of around 1 million (10 lakh) fans on its verified facebook page, posted a bid of $30 to post one status update.

We did not expect much response with just one status update but were pleasantly surprised that the brand got instant visibility as the post was liked by more than 500 people on the first day itself. Most of the likes were from women who shop online, a target segment difficult to reach otherwise. Kias made online sales of $1200 (Rs. 75,000) in one day and the traffic on its website also went up more than 10 times. All of it, at a total cost of $30 only. Massive Return on Investment!

Industry as we foresee

We expect influencer marketing on social media to grow exponentially in the coming years. It is already very popular in the West as according to 2014 State of Sponsored Social Report by Halverson Group - 52% of marketers used paid online influencers within the past year, second only to display ads (58%). We expect this percentage to increase even further and expect this trend to continue in India also as brands are now opening up to the idea of hiring social influencers.

The second emerging trend would be to use Celebrity Influencers for “online only” brand endorsements on social media. This is also common in the West as advertisers are using popular celebrities such as Kim Kardashain, who regularly post sponsored content on social media.

With increasing internet penetration and digital spending, influencer marketing is all set to grow in the near future. So next time you wish to engage influencers to promote your brand or to make money from your social media presence, try fromote.com!

Lastly, Are you hiring?

Yes, we are looking for people who can help in getting advertisers on board or have experience in managing celebrity relationships.