SoCast’s 2024 Innovations and an Exciting Look at 2025

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2024 was a transformative year for SoCast, defined by strategic acquisitions, product advancements, and our commitment to making digital growth easy for radio broadcasters. By actively listening to our users, we implemented over 1,000 enhancements and 900 bug fixes based on their feedback, delivering meaningful improvements to ensure platform reliability, performance, and user satisfaction. Here’s a comprehensive look at our key achievements and an exciting preview of what’s coming in 2025.

Acquisition of Frankly Media’s AMP Radio Business

In a strategic move to enhance our service offerings, SoCast acquired the AMP radio business from Frankly Media, expanding our client base to 250 broadcasters, over 2,000 stations, and 7,500 product users, including major broadcasters like Cumulus Media. This acquisition allows us to integrate the best of AMP into SoCast Engage, enriching our digital ecosystem with advanced tools for website management, mobile apps, social media, and audience engagement. To ensure a seamless transition, key personnel from Frankly Media have joined SoCast, and we’ve strengthened our customer success team to maintain exceptional support. This acquisition reaffirms our commitment to empowering radio broadcasters with innovative, user-friendly tools to thrive in a digital-first world.

SoCast Engage: Elevating Digital Engagement

1. Simplified Contest Sign-Ups

Based on client feedback, we’ve simplified the contest entry process to just three quick steps with a user-friendly, mobile-responsive interface, making it easier than ever for listeners to participate. The new system also offers enhanced engagement tools, including quick sweepstakes, interactive polls, user-generated content submissions, and “Listen to Win” contests that encourage live tune-ins. Contest management is now streamlined with customizable templates, flexible contest pages, efficient moderation tools, and mobile-friendly back-end access. This upgrade helps stations grow their audience, collect valuable insights, and boost engagement while creating a seamless experience for everyone involved. Learn more about this contest upgrade here. 

2. Enhanced Stock Image System

We upgraded the stock image experience to make it easier and safer to build engaging content. Through a partnership with Deposit Photos, we’ve provided access to a rich library of high-quality, royalty-free stock images that are perfect for blog posts, web pages, and more. Great visuals are key to boosting clickthrough rates, especially when sharing content on social media, and now it’s simpler than ever to find the right image. Based on customer feedback, we introduced an image preview tool, making it quick and effortless to select the perfect image for every project. Learn more about the new stock image system here.

Additional SoCast Engage Releases

• Email and SMS Partnerships: Collaborating with iContact and TextGroove, we integrated comprehensive email and texting solutions into SoCast Engage. By managing onboarding, support, and billing, we offer clients a seamless experience for all digital communication needs.
• Improved Content Syndication: Publishing across multiple stations is now faster and more efficient than ever with near real-time syndication. This enhancement ensures that breaking news and critical updates reach your audience immediately, keeping them informed and engaged.
• Contact Form Spam Detection: We’ve improved spam filtering for contact forms, reducing unwanted submissions and ensuring higher-quality communication with your audience. This enhancement helps stations focus on genuine inquiries and streamline their workflows.
• Contest Analytics: We’ve added contest analytics to provide stations with deeper insights into their listeners. By tracking participation metrics and user behavior, stations can better understand their audience, refine engagement strategies, and make data-driven decisions to boost interaction and loyalty.
• New Full Page Takeover Ad Unit: We introduced a full-page ad unit to our player, offering broadcasters a premium revenue opportunity.
• Company-Wide ads.txt: We’ve introduced a unified ads.txt file for all stations, ensuring transparency and compliance with ad servers like Google Ads. This update simplifies ad management and reinforces trust with advertisers.

SoCast Reach: Empowering Sales Teams

1. The New SoCast Reach

We introduced SoCast Reach Plus, Pro, and Enterprise tiers to cater to broadcasters at every stage of their digital sales journey. 

• SoCast Reach Plus is perfect for broadcasters just starting with digital sales: you identify the opportunity, and we handle the rest, paying you for your success. 
• SoCast Reach Pro is designed for broadcasters expanding their digital footprint, featuring our “True” products with guaranteed impressions (TrueReach) and clicks (TrueClick) to set radio sales teams apart from competitors. 
• SoCast Reach Enterprise is tailored for broadcasters ready to take full control of their digital agency, providing a robust order management system to successfully run and scale their business. These tiers ensure every broadcaster has the tools they need to thrive in digital advertising.

2. Real-Time Facebook and Google Proposals Powered by A.I.

Creating media plans for search and social campaigns has never been easier. Previously, generating a proposal required submitting a request and waiting up to 48 hours—but those days are over. With our real-time integration with Google and Facebook APIs, forecasts are now delivered in seconds, empowering sales teams to act quickly and confidently. Leveraging A.I., we’ve enhanced the accuracy of these forecasts, ensuring media plans are highly targeted and effective. To further streamline the process, we’ve introduced automated keyword generation for search campaigns—just provide your advertiser’s website address, and let the system do the rest. These advancements save time and deliver unmatched precision for every campaign.

Additional SoCast Reach Releases

• Redesigned Delivery Reports: We completely revamped our delivery reports based on user feedback. Reports now include conversion metrics to track ROI, enhanced visuals for creatives and target maps, and a presentation-ready format that can be automatically emailed to advertisers or sales teams.
• Proposal Map Upgrades: We redesigned our proposal map targeting system to be faster and more accurate, making it easier for broadcasters to deliver precision-targeted campaigns.
• Improved Proposal Budget Management: Sales teams can now set monthly or campaign budgets, with automatic calculations for better planning.
• Financial Reconciliation Tools: Our Financial Reconciliation Report simplifies the reconciliation process for digital campaigns, ensuring seamless integration with systems like WideOrbit.

Looking Ahead to 2025

As we prepare for 2025, our focus is on developing innovative tools and features that further empower broadcasters and streamline their operations. Here’s a preview of what’s on the horizon:

SoCast Engage

• Event Calendar System Upgrade: Manage and promote event calendars effortlessly with an upgraded system. Allow community members to submit their own events, customize calendar appearances, and streamline event planning.
• Mega Contests: A turnkey, fully managed contesting service where we handle everything—from scheduling and site design to running contests and issuing prizes. Broadcasters benefit from increased website and app engagement as well as email sign-ups.
• Voting Contests: Engage listeners in a fun and interactive way by allowing them to vote on photos or videos to win prizes.
• Video Capabilities: Deliver a more immersive audience experience with enhanced video features for content and engagement.
• Syndicated Feature Rotators: Simplify the management of national promotions by syndicating feature rotators across multiple stations.

SoCast Reach

• Delivery Report Upgrades: Streamline reporting processes by reducing monthly reporting efforts from hours to minutes. Improvements will make it easier to access reports by advertiser, consolidate metrics across multiple channels, and compare month-to-month performance.
• AI-Powered Delivery Reports: Leverage AI to analyze delivery reports and generate actionable insights for advertisers. This feature will save sales teams time, support renewals, and drive upsells.
• Digital Order Management System: A comprehensive system designed to simplify and optimize digital ad campaign management for enterprise-level ad agencies.

2024 was a year of significant progress and innovation at SoCast. We are grateful to our clients and partners for their continued support and look forward to building on this momentum in 2025. Together, we will continue to revolutionize digital solutions for radio broadcasters, making digital growth easy and accessible for all.