#perch app

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Perch is featured in the Wall Street Journal

We’re excited to announce that Perch is included in the Wall Street Journal article as one of “The Best Apps to Run a Startup From Your Phone”.  Read more at http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-apps-to-run-a-startup-from-your-phone-1453690989

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Quickly Compare Your Social Media Stats to Your Competition

We just added another helpful and time-saving feature to Perch. When you’re using the web version of Perch, you can now quickly compare the size of your social audience, your social engagement for the past 14 days and the recent chatter about your business to any business you’re watching.  

This feature is available when you’re logged into my.perchapp.com and select one of the businesses you’re watching.    

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The Sugar Street Bakery stays informed with Perch

Not long ago, Matt and Jennifer Hogle both abandoned successful careers in finance. Jennifer left her job to stay home when the kids were born. Matt continued his job in energy trading until one day he realized he wanted to see his kids grow up rather than spend endless hours away from the family.  

Jennifer always loved baking, and this led to the two exploring the possibility of opening their own bakery. They crunched some numbers, figured it could work, and they found a space in historic downtown League City, Texas, near Houston.

They opened Sugar Street Bakery in July, 2015. After just six months in business, Sugar Street had gained over 4,400 followers on Facebook. Not a bad start.

Matt handles marketing for the bakery, and he did his homework. He arrived at the conclusion - as many small business owners do - that social media would be the most cost effective advertising medium for the business. Facebook comprises about 80% of their marketing budget. The bulk of the rest goes toward a spot on a digital billboard in a part of town that has incredibly congested traffic during rush hour.

From the beginning, Matt and Jennifer would spend a lot of time checking in on the social media feeds of the 18 identified competitive businesses in their area. Matt followed all of them on his personal Facebook page. Then he stumbled upon Perch. “What we were doing before was, each day we’d visit our competitors’ Facebook pages, see what are they posting about, check what their customers are saying. We’d look at their Yelp pages, check those reviews… after doing that every day for a while, we started searching for some sort of platform or app that aggregates all this data. And we found Perch. We were essentially doing what Perch does every day, only doing it ourselves, which takes a lot more time.”

Matt’s Facebook spend is comprised largely of targeted ads, with some post boosts as well. Thanks to the consistent supply of information from Perch, Matt has found a clever way to make use of his knowledge of reviews of competitive businesses. “If a person leaves a negative review for one of my competitors, we will target them through our Facebook marketing. If they are unhappy with one of our competitors, they will see our ad on their Facebook page for two weeks. We’ve had great success with that.”

He adds, “We might be a little bit more aggressive than most of our competitors in our marketing strategy, and I think that is driven by my having worked in energy trading, which is a very aggressive industry - whereas most bakery owners are more the artsy type. We want people to know that we’re the best place around.”

Perch is also helpful as a motivator for Sugar Street’s employees. Showing employees a steady stream of positive reviews and posts about Sugar Street helps them feel good about what they’re doing.”

By his own admission, Matt is “not a big Instagrammer”. But even without being on Instagram very often, Matt still sees all the action Sugar Street is getting via the Perch app. He also sees what his competitors have going on. Having seen the exposure other businesses are getting on Instagram, Matt intends to step up his own presence there.

Matt checks Perch four or five times a day, frequently prompted by the app’s alerts. He also appreciates the weekly email update that lets him know what’s been working with his social media approach.

Perch has become an essential part of Matt’s business success. “The most important info Perch gives is insight into what competitors are doing. It does what I was already trying to do myself, but it does it much better. It saves me time and it’s convenient.”