On Internet Business

Posterous – small business saviour?

Posted by Michael under Social Media

Posterous is making news at present and it could be the answer for small business owners who struggle to equip a traditional business for the new online world.

How it works

Posterous is essentially just another blogging platform – but the difference is that your email account is the administrative interface, so you don’t have a separate, dedicated interface to create blog posts.

Posterous also offers an intelligent service that works for you to solve posting problems. If, for example, you want to add a photograph to a blog post, you simply attach it to the email that you send to Posterous and it then resizes the photo and loads it alongside the text. It will also flash code and embed videos and parse you links so if you add a youtube link, Posterous turns it into an embedded player on the page.

The biggest point in its favour is that it’s free – so for small entrepreneurs, or people whose business is seasonal, it’s a cost-free way of getting good outreach without making investments in hard or soft systems.

Multi-platform posting

Because you can configure Posterous to automatically update your blog, twitter or flickr account, it can be used as a simple one-stop shop for a variety of social media.

Downsides of Posterous

One problem with the platform is that it’s only just got into customisation – until very recently every account opened with Posterous had to look and function in the same way, so more sophisticated users couldn’t develop their accounts beyond the basic platform level. It remains to be seen if the ‘theming’ that Posterous offers will be flexible enough to suit the really skilled user.

Another feature that is lacking is the ability to at static pages or links – this can be done, but only as part of the sidebar called ‘About Me’ which looks unbusinesslike to say the least.

The biggest problem, in the long term, is that you can’t export content from Posterous to other places – without a system of data transfer the value of the system is limited.

Overall assessment

However, for small businesses who don’t have dedicated staff to master and monitor social media, internet pages and the like, but who recognise the need to move past a simple shopfront style website and offer a less static feel to their business presence, Posterous is a good stepping stone. And when Posterous Pro launches at the end of this year, it will offer advanced features like advertising and give paying users more space.

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