October 13, 2013

For news sites and blogs, fan sites and Facebook pages, content is still king on the Internet. Whether you are selling high-end sneakers, music downloads or the latest news reports on Syria, consumers are looking, judging and interacting socially to learn more about your product and sometimes test your expertise.

Google Alerts, Percolate, Digg and LinkedIn help source raw and new stories that are shareable. But a startup from Israel may have a better timesaving solution for content managers, shaving hours of time off the daily scour.

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Israel’s Swayy is the latest startup company to help social media experts become tastemakers for online readers and fans.

Some are calling Swayy “addictive” as it’s providing the type of curated content they are looking for before anyone else sees it. Social media consultants and bloggers like Shira Abel from Hunter & Bard have tried it.

“I love Swayy because it often delivers interesting pieces before they start trending — so I can be one of the first to mention it, instead of the last,” Abel tells ISRAEL21c.

Using a patent-pending algorithm, Swayy conglomerates the best of trending articles on the Internet –– from reputable news sources to blogs, Facebook likes and trending hash tags –– matched to what a tastemaker has read and shared in the past.

This is all so social content managers can stay relevant in the social-media space while cutting down on time searching for stuff to share from the Internet.

A handy dashboard analyzes keywords and shares, and gives a sense of metrics to using Swayy over time.

The Israel-based online magazine Geektime says that “Israeli startup Swayy will help you understand who your followers are and what content they want to consume, helping you increase your celebrityhood and your community draw.”

No autobots here

The company has chosen some 50,000 news and media sites to deliver to content managers, according to company cofounder Lior Degani.

“Basically the idea is to provide you with content to share on social networks to help you with your content strategy … to grow your expertise, to be a thought leader,” he tells ISRAEL21c.

“Social media managers try and follow the 70-30 rule,” Degani notes.

That means 70 percent of one’s own content and 30% from other sources, which may or may not be consumed before it’s shared.

That’s where Swayy steps in. Its unique algorithm analyzes your media property URL, content and social networks and activity inside your domain to understand what users are reading and interacting with.

Based on that and key areas a media manager will select, Swayy sends you daily reports with news ideas and statistics worth sharing and following.

“It’s possible to do this by hand, and that’s basically what people are doing today. It just takes time and knowledge,” explains Degani, who founded Swayy with Ohad Frankfurt, Shlomi Babluki and Oz Katz.

The Swayy platform can be useful for a tech guy who owns his own startup company with a few hundred followers as well as for major brands seeking to expand their social domain.

“Some people and brands have a big community they need to engage with all the time, and Swayy helps them find that content,” Degani reiterates. “Social media managers are our core users.”

It can also be a useful tool for content discovery for journalists and bloggers looking for story leads in a “smarter” way than just Googling or reading blogs and the news.

“Bloggers asked us to do this because we only want to share quality content,” says Degani.

Going deeper across verticals

“If you are looking for content on the economy — let’s say the Israeli economy — we can suggest articles about Yair Lapid and Stanley Fischer, just based on specific topics. The secret here is that we are taking your community and analyzing it all the time, and on the other side we are finding content that matches this community.”

Degani adds that content discovery is a big field with lots of players providing tools for reading new articles.

“We want to be the content discovery application tool for social media. This is something that hasn’t been discovered yet. The other companies are missing the idea of helping you with your content strategy. We want to be the best tool for content strategy – for both brands and websites.

“On the basic level it takes out the time-consuming part of the day, searching for articles, from three hours a day to 15 minutes.”

Swayy was founded in 2012, and is based in Tel Aviv. About 1.5 percent of users are paying clients, who pay $9 to $30 a month for the service.

“We want to increase clicks and want to find content that the reader would like to click on,” Degani says of what seems like a straightforward tool built by smart engineering minds linked to Israel’s elite programming units in the army.

Not having multilingual support is one drawback to Swayy, critics write, as is the need to open yet another email and risk exposing a social network to a new link source; but if it can shave hours off hunting for stories, this could be an email worth opening.

Other companies in this content discovery area include Israel’s Buzzspice, Percolate, and Scoop.it, for those comparing services.

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