LocalVox Buys First Growth Graduate Postling To Give SMBs A One-Stop Shop For Social Media Management & Local Marketing

Nov 1, 2012 via TechCrunch by Rip Empson – If you don’t live in New York City, you may not have heard of LocalVox. But the startup, which aims to simplify local marketing for small businesses and publishers, is beginning to take off. Headquartered in the Big Apple, the startup initially focused its efforts in its own backyard, but thanks to the $7.5 million series A it closed two weeks ago, it is now setting its sights on a more national audience.

As part of increasing that scope, LocalVox is today announcing the acquisition of Postling, also an NYC-based startup [and a First Growth Venture Network Graduate], which makes a social media dashboard that helps small business owners monitor their social streams, get notified when someone posts to their social pages, and discover who their most influential followers and customers are on social media.

Basically, Postling has been trying to take HootSuite and simplify and streamline it by presenting social media management in a Gmail-style interface. The idea being that most management tools out there right now favor the stream approach and are far too bloated and noisy for most small business owners to use effectively.

While LocalVox isn’t sharing the financial terms of the deal, it has acquired Postling’s technology and platform with the acquisition, however, the startup’s Social Inbox will continue to be offered as a standalone app on Postling.com.

Read more at TechCrunch…