For both artists and big brands, being able to communicate with fans and supporters socially is a key to staying relevant. With so many TV channels, websites, and ways of communication, users’ attention spans are short, especially when it involves what acts and products they support. Having a great social media strategy can be what keeps a brand current while its competitors struggle to stay fresh. FanBridge, a startup based out of New York that has recently opened offices in San Francisco and Buenos Aires, can help out by combining two of the key aspects of the internet.

Through email and social media, FanBridge helps brands and artists communicate effectively with their fans, according to Jason Small, Director of Film/TV Relations for FanBridge. “We power email and social campaigns with professional level tools and services, and maximize the way they work together. It doesn’t matter whether we’re working with a big brand or a new artist or band. We’re used by clients to support some of the largest fan bases out there, but we also have clients like brand new artists or companies just getting off the ground,” said Small. FanBridge’s client base includes musical artists like Linkin Park and the Dave Matthews Band, brands like Gatorade and Stolichnaya, and celebrities, filmmakers, and professional athletes.

FanBridge is a largely self-serving management platform, meaning that the artists and brands still completely control what information they send out to their fans, although a client services department of relationship builders is available to give clients advice. FanBridge focuses primarily on the interaction between brands and its users via email and through social networks, and attempts to make the two distinct services work in tandem with each other. “We've taken advantage of the fact that we have a complete platform that provides both email and social campaign tools. We've built our products in ways that bridge and support the relationship between email and social media, increasing the impact of campaigns in both areas,” Small said. “Take for example our newest product, Social Digest. It automatically aggregates our clients’ best social media content from places like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube into a beautiful email newsletter for subscribers. We've seen this product double open rates and triple click through rates to the social content it highlights.”

Social media clients that help brands control their social presence have been consistently popping up in recent years. Just last week, I wrote about HootSuite, which, among other things, uses an interactive dashboard to allow users to send out updates in many different ways across multiple social sites. HootSuite provides a deeply integrated service to all types of social media, but email, which is still the most popular Internet activity, isn’t a part of it. By combining email and social campaigns, FanBridge is acknowledging that two of the primary reasons people go online are to check email and go on social media sites. Social Digest allows brands stay relevant to their fans while they do both of these things. Instead of working separately, having these two pillars of the Internet work together keeps brands in the minds of fans as often as possible.