Schedule never-ending content, increase engagement and listen to customers impressions

SocialWeaver makes it easy to schedule never-ending content, increase engagement, and listen to customers’ impressions — of you and your competitors.

Kevin William David interviewed Yousif Abood, CEO at SocialWeaver to know more.

Hi Yousif, So tell us about SocialWeaver?

Sure, SocialWeaver is a social media management platform that makes it easy to schedule and publish categorized content, actively listen in on (and learn from) any brand in the world, and engage with followers on any network all in one convenient place.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

SocialWeaver was born out of necessity when existing platforms didn’t offer quite what we needed. We wanted to excel in social media management, and to do that, we needed to actively listen in on online competitor conversations. How often are they posting? What resonates with their user base? How are they succeeding or failing to engage their followers?

Unfortunately, most solutions on the market focused only on publishing content. To listen in on other brands, we had to manually inspect articles, read through comment sections, and manage clunky spreadsheets with saved links that didn’t allow us to easily view or engage with content. We knew there had to be a better way — so we built one.

How is SocialWeaver different from what already exists in the market?

Existing social media management solutions like Buffer, MeetEdgar, and Post Planner are mostly focused on scheduling and publishing content, but publishing alone is not enough because social media is a two-way conversation. You need to listen and engage with your audience to be effective. Our platform was built from the ground up to enable businesses and digital markets to publish, listen, and engage at scale in one place.

What’s unique about SocialWeaver is that it allows you to listen in on any brand in the world. You can create a stream for any keyword, hashtag, or brand, then follow how it performs over time, even filtering posts by positive or negative sentiment and level of engagement. By viewing every network in a unified stream, you can check in on how any brand is performing online in just minutes.

As you listen in on competitors and leading brands, you can learn from others’ efforts. From frequency of posts to the type of content that’s being shared, it’s now possible to discover what any company’s audience responds well to without spending time and energy running tests across platforms. This makes it easy for business owners, marketers, and social media managers to stay informed about how their target audience reacts to content online — highly valuable information that was, until now, extremely expensive and difficult to come by.

Who uses SocialWeaver?

Currently, the majority of our users are digital marketers and social media specialists working for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

How are your customers using SocialWeaver? Could you share a few different use cases?

I would say the most common use case is social listening. After all, social listening is at the heart of why we created SocialWeaver in the first place. Of course, there are platforms out there that let you search keywords and mentions, but results are generally limited. If you want to track a specific competitor, you can’t find much beyond their most popular posts — a marginally helpful but woefully incomplete picture of what a brand is accomplishing online.

Scheduling and publishing content is a pretty common use case as well. Most users spend an hour or two each week creating, storing, and scheduling content by category. For example, users can set the calendar to post something from the Motivation category every Monday at 10 am, a Helpful Hint each weekday at 3 pm, and a Testimonial each Thursday at 11 am. The categorized schedules are then combined to generate the publishing queue — and because SocialWeaver recycles the content library automatically, there’s always content being pushed out on schedule across networks.

Have there been unique use cases for SocialWeaver that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Yes! Our users are very creative. There’s one particular use case that stood out to me. One customer from Hong Kong is using SocialWeaver to stay up to date with his online marketplace competitors. He’s tracking product availability, discounts, and pricing.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Not a growth hack per se, but being available around the clock to help paid and free users set up their accounts, answer questions, or receive feedback has helped us a lot. It gave us a better understanding of our customers’ needs and allowed us to focus on what’s important in terms of product development and user experience.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

We still have many challenges that we deal with day in and day out, but perhaps the biggest challenge we faced early on was resources, money to be more specific. Hosting a complex application like ours can be very expensive. Especially at the beginning, when there’s no revenue to justify the high spend on infrastructure and tools. However, after some research we found Microsoft BizSpark, a program for startups to receive to free software, services, technical support, and Azure cloud credit for up to 5 developers which was more than enough for us. Took about two months to get accepted into BizSpark, but we were set for three years.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

Many, but the most interesting ones are Intercom and FullStory.

Intercom allowed us to automate the entire onboarding process for all new customers. It also allowed us to provide and collect feedback from customers through event triggered messages.

FullStory helped us simplify and improve our UX dramatically. I cannot recommend it enough.

Finally, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Slack: team communication and collaboration. We have a few integrations enabled like TeamCity, Github, Intercom, Mailchimp, and others.

Intercom: Communicate and support users.

FullStory: Improve user experience.

Atlassian: Development wiki and bug tracking

Moqups: Design product mockups and flows

Originally published at siftery.com.