Get Satisfaction helps small businesses engage on social media with $49/user service

Community platform Get Satisfaction has launched a new service for small businesses that it hopes will enable them to build thriving customer communities. With Get Satisfaction for Small Businesses, those companies that fit the profile will be able to handle customer experiences through this tool chest, priced specifically for them. In addition, Get Satisfaction has simplified its pricing model — now all businesses can pay per user instead of based on the features they want.

Calling 2013 the “year of the community manager”, CEO Wendy Lea, says Get Satisfaction wants to enable any company to understand the impact and potential of this “transformational role”. She adds that “by fostering customer-to-customer interactions, community managers bring tremendous business value to multiple departments across their company — lowering support costs, bringing better products to market, and acquiring new customers.”

Last November, the company revived its free product and added new features to make it appealing to small businesses. There are over 67,000 communities on the Get Satisfaction network that are free, not all of which are active. Each business receives one seat to utilize moderator tools, the service’s Engage Widgets, and partake in its Hootsuite integration.

At the time, the company’s VP of Product Marketing Scott Hirsch told us that Get Satisfaction was interested in getting back to its roots where its customers were SMBs and startups, including Foursquare, Twitter, Balsamic, Skitch, and others. Now, several months later, it appears that the company is taking it one step forward.

With the Get Satisfaction for Small Business plan, customers will receive the following:

• Getting Started App: Within the first 30 days of a trial, Get Satisfaction will help new community managers through the important steps as they launch their communities: setting up the community, seeding it with relevant content, and inviting their customers to join.
• Community Health Analytics: Get Satisfaction is offering for the first time, a small business-friendly version of a feature usually reserved for those in the enterprise. With this tool, businesses can gleam invaluable insights about their community in order to identify customer prospects and brand advocates, as well as examining any trends that may emerge around products and customer support issues.
• Social Media Integrations: Businesses will receive access to Get Satisfaction’s Facebook app and take advantage of the service’s integration with Hootsuite.

In addition to the the above features, the small business plan includes domain aliasing, single sign-on functionality, and support for 11 languages.

As mentioned earlier, in addition to the release of a plan for small businesses, Get Satisfaction has also revamped its pricing model. Starting today, for $49 per month, companies can receive the same set of core features and one community management seat. It’s important to note that this pricing structure is not for the enterprise services, just those that qualify under small business.

Get Satisfaction’s launch of its small business plan is surely an attempt to try and separate itself from its industry competitors, including UserVoice, Zendesk, SuggestionBox, Desk.com, and others — many that have free plans as well.

The company has raised $20.9 million from investors such as Adaptive Path, First Round Capital, Jeff Clavier, Freestyle Capital, SoftTech VC, Azure Capital Partners, and more.

Photo credit: GUILLERMO LEGARIA/AFP/Getty Images