“We’re seeing a fundamental shift in howsmall businesses reach customers and prospects. It’s a shift away frombroadcast marketing towards engagement, and social media is right at the center of this shift,” said Mark Schmulen, general manager, social media, Constant Contact.

Constant Contact’s Fall 2011 Attitudes and Outlook Survey showed a significant increase insocial media adoption as more and more small businesses find it to be lowcost and easy to use. However, it can be time consuming and few can point to real business success from their investment.

“Social Campaigns is a results-driven solution that allows small businesses to truly benefit from social media marketing beyond basic posting and monitoring,” said Schmulen.  “It turns social media into a real, measurable marketing channel that empowers users to grow their audience and their business.”

The launch of Social Campaigns creates a new category of social media marketing applications for small businesses and nonprofits. Users can easily create professional-looking landing pages on Facebook, where they can run Liked-gated campaigns and offers, such as vouchers, weekly specials, fundraisers, product showcases, videos and more. Users can publish and promote their campaigns to their Facebook fans, Twitter® followers, LinkedIn® connections andemail subscribers from within the Constant Contact platform. Proving that social media can drive real marketing results, Social Campaigns provides users with reports on campaign metrics, including fan growth, email list growth, visits, clicks, downloads and participant sharing.

This launch coincides with Constant Contact’s official entry into the UK market. With more than 450,000 SME customers worldwide – 10,000 of which are in the UK – Constant Contact aims to support its current UK customer and partner base and help all SMEs build successful, lasting customer relationships.

“The true value of social media is not just about how many fans and followers you have – it’s about what you do with them,” said Schmulen.  “With Social Campaigns, small businesses can go beyond just getting ‘Likes’ by creating real engagement opportunities that keep businesses top of mind with their loyal customers and make it easy forthem to share campaigns with their networks and friends. It’s results-driven marketing with the metrics to back it up.”

Social Campaigns is easy to use and backed by Constant Contact’s unrivalled small business expertise, KnowHow and world-class personal coaching.  Anyone can run their first campaign for free, and the product is free for users with less than 100 Facebook fans.

With the launch of Social Campaigns, small businesses now have a full arsenal of tools to create success no matter where they are in their knowledge of or experience with social media marketing.  Small businesses can:

•       Get started with Constant Contact’s Social Media Quickstarter
•       Engage with current and prospective customers using Social Campaigns
•       Listen and monitor all of their social network activity with NutshellMail

Social Campaigns is currently available by private invitation to a select number of users and will be available to thegeneral public in early 2012.  Smallbusinesses looking for more information or who want to be notified when Social Campaigns is available can sign up here: http://conta.cc/rN2xF1