RebelMouse, which describes itself as “the first digital publishing platform that is fully wired for social,” has added to its repertoire of social engagement tools with The River, a personalised content combiner that lets individuals and brands deliver personalised news feeds, notifications and social graph connections all from the same “social front page.”
Anyone who’s remotely familiar with Facebook (or any other social site with a news feed for that matter) will find The River pretty familiar, although it’s certainly less indiscriminate in that it’s tied to specific sites, content producers or communities. Essentially, it lets you track activity in a community of your choice based on the topics or people you follow (and it works on mobile apps as well).
RebelMouse founder and CEO Paul Berry (who in a former life was the Huff Post’s CTO) says that The River’s features will ensure no one will end up staring at an empty feed wondering “Where’s everybody gone?” As he puts it, it “ingests social graphs from all the networks, so that you’re not starting from zero. And if you have favourite content creator, it lets you follow them and see any new content they publish on the main site.
Sites can launch their own versions of The River and when users sign up, they get presented immediately with freshly published content even if they haven’t previously followed. The latest iteration form RebelMouse’s ‘Rebel Roar’ platform, which can also A/B test headlines and feature social quizzes and polls, it’s all part of the startup’s original obsession with, in Berry’s words, “supercharging content, growing audience and turning that growth into a loyal community.”
For many, being able to create the social front page is enough. But brands and publishers are tapping The River because they want to build communities on their own sites. Berry explains:
“Really, the transition is we’ve evolved into a B2B SaaS company.”
For those unfamiliar with the lingo, that means a business that sells subscription software to other companies.
According to berry, RebelMouse now has 4.2 million users in total, 1,650 of who are paying customers. And Rebel Roar is picking up fast: when it originally launched, it took months to create a Roar site. Now it takes days.
