We have a lot of love for small businesses at Get Satisfaction, and for good reason. Small business is driving our economy—out of the 158,000 new jobs that were created in the U.S. in the last month, about half were a result of small business. In addition, we’re excited and inspired by the creative ways savvy small business owners are leveraging  social media to expand and engage with their customer base.

Get Satisfaction is the customer engagement platform of choice for more than 70,000 customer communities, and we want all of them to thrive!  In the spirit of helping all of our customers achieve even more success with their customer communities (especially our small business customers), we are pleased to announce several enhancements to our Free Plan. Certain Get Satisfaction Free communities—like the completely customer-run community which was created organically by and for people using Apple products highlighted in the infographic below—were thriving before these enhancements. But new features in Get Satisfaction’s Free Plan are designed to help all of our customers build even better, long-lasting connections with consumers, improve customer service, build better products, and increase revenue.

The new enhancements to the “Free Plan” include features that previously were only available in Get Satisfaction’s paid plans. These expanded capabilities enable small businesses to ensure their communities thrive by being able to manage content strategically and bring relevant social conversations from the community to any page throughout their website.

A summary of key features and benefits in Get Satisfaction Free includes:

• Moderation Tools allow community managers to curate and edit content, set topic status, and manage customer relationships.
• Engage Widgets make it quick and easy for businesses to embed their Get Satisfaction community conversations anywhere on their website—on product pages, support pages, marketing pages, or even the home page—enabling customer conversations to be used as rich marketing content and accelerate the sales process.
• HootSuite integration allows users to port conversations from Facebook and Twitter into their community to extend the shelf-life of social content and make it discoverable by other customers, prospects, and search engines

Champion badge enables companies to recognize, reward, and incentivize active users in the community as brand Champions.

The message of the free community created by and for Apple customer is clear— your customers want to be online discussing your products and services with like-minded people, and they will do so whether you’re there moderating and responding to the conversation or not.  So check out our free community to join the conversation with your customers and prospects and create social experiences for marketing, feedback, and customer service. With the enhanced capabilities of our free plan, companies of all sizes can leverage the benefits of customer communities.