Spring Capital is backing Helsinki-based React & Share
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We are happy to announce our second seed-stage investment in Finland — the content analytics SaaS company React & Share. Having proven themselves as a valuable tool for Finnish communication teams, the team is now ready to take on international markets.
Content teams operating in the dark
Content creation and content based marketing has seen a significant surge during the past decade. Leaving aside the amount of clicks and shares that articles get, content teams are still lagging behind the sales and marketing departments when collecting data and generating insights. When it comes to measuring and reporting their ROI and building data-driven processes, most of the content teams don’t have a clear overview of how the content is actually consumed. There are no answers to questions on what the readers really like and how well they understand the articles.
As content teams have increasing requirements from top management to bridge this gap, they are testing out a variety of tools. The problem with many of the current content analytics tools is that they’re designed with the enterprise in mind and are ill-suited for smaller businesses and content teams. Moreover, the quantitative data will only give the numbers side while the content creators are still left in the dark about the crucial question: “why did the reader decide to act this way or that way?”.
Human-centered data approach
As the world is shifting away from narrow quantitative metrics such as page views and ad clicks, React & Share is helping content teams by combining the hard data with qualitative insights. And they have made it really easy to start using the service.
First, they are providing reader engagement tools that are embedded on the customers’ sites: reaction buttons, feedback tools, share buttons and content recommendation. Depending on whether the reaction was positive or negative, customers are prompted to share the article, give more in-depth feedback or in some cases leave their contact details for lead generation purposes.
Second, they measure user behaviour while reading the article and condense the data on these behaviours to meaningful insights.
All of the data then runs into a central dashboard, where customers can easily and intuitively understand which pieces of content are performing well, which ones aren’t, why, and what they should do next.
Focused team
Behind the product is a brilliant and really enthusiastic team from Finland. From day 1 they were focused on the idea of identifying people’s personalities online. Having a background in web design, marketing and blogging, the CEO Timo Virtanen understood firsthand how necessary getting accurate reader feedback was for content creators’ motivation.
At first, React & Share tested out the reaction button concept on 7 lifestyle blogs. Even though they got a lot of engagement and the writers were happy, the bloggers still did not have the purchasing power. Having learned that, the team made a pivot towards businesses and larger organisations. As a result, they saw their revenues triple in 2019 and just recently closed their investment round of 285K EUR.
Interestingly, the team has been gaining a lot of traction from the COVID-19 crisis as a lot of content is published on that and related topics and people really seek a lot of help from these articles. It is React & Share that in many cases is analysing if the article is helpful, understandable or is confusing and should be tweaked. So in a sense the people in React & Share are helping to bring some clarity to the complex situations that humanity finds itself tackling.
We’re certainly excited to see them move forward in 2020.
Publishing content on your website and want to check out how you can gain insight into reader experience?
Check out React & Share’s free trial at their homepage.
