This article was published on April 3, 2012

Involver launches Visual SML to make creating Facebook apps easier for marketers


Involver launches Visual SML to make creating Facebook apps easier for marketers

Involver is a company that you might have never heard of, but one that helps companies create things that you see all of the time on Facebook. Involver does enterprise level social marketing management, which might sound boring at first, and invented SML (social markup language), which powers thousands of apps on Facebook.

The company sells its services through agencies, who then turn them around to companies trying to engage their customers, and potential customers, on the gigantic social network.

The tools that Involver currently provides requires in-depth technical knowledge, which is often a stumbling block for these larger companies looking to get social, fast. Today at ad:tech, a conference in San Francisco catering to advertisers and marketers, the company is launching a new product called “Visual SML”, which is comprised of easy drag-and-drop interfaces so that marketers and non-technical people at these companies can get apps out the door quickly.

According to Senior Director of Product Marketing at Involver, Roland Smart, this product has been at the top of the list when it comes to feature requests from customers:

As more and more companies expand their social media presence, the people who control that content want direct input into the result. But that doesn’t mean that they want cookie-cutter solutions. They want a solution that is simple to design but still produces compelling results. Visual SML is designed specifically for those who need to create these types of engaging Facebook experiences but can’t afford to make every page an expensive technical services task.

Without any front-end expertise needed, anyone in an organization can use the visual authoring tool to get an app off the ground quickly. Additionally, multiple people within your organization can make edits to these tools without interrupting a developer from their other work or disrupting a development cycle completely.

Here’s what these tools look like:

Involver has also done an overhaul of their monitoring product and backend user interface. It’s more of a conversation suite, a “hybrid of Hootsuite, threaded messages like Email”, Smart tells me. You can assign messages to people, using it as a complete backend system for support and social interaction.

There are quite a few companies showing off their stuff at ad:tech and we’ll be sure to let you know what’s hot when it comes to the merging of the social and advertising worlds.

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