What it is
Why should your Twitter followers be the only ones to see your expertly crafted tweets? And isn’t it a shame that only your Tumblr followers get to laugh at your awesome GIFs?
With Rebelmouse, brand marketers can now curate content from all their social media feeds and display them on one website. The platform makes it easy to add the latest posts from your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Google+ accounts. In addition to social media, you can add blog posts, articles and images through links on Twitter.
“With all your content scattered across several different channels, it creates a lot of noise,” says Stephanie Bagley, director of partnerships at Rebelmouse. “We give you the chance to put all of your best content in one place, and make it easier for consumers to connect to it.”
The platform was founded by the Paul Berry, the former CTO of The Huffington Post. Berry’s the one responsible for creating HuffPo’s very intuitive publishing platform for its writers and editors. He’s also the one responsible for the design that makes those articles so highly shareable. He’s brought much of that viral publishing sensibility to the Rebelmouse platform as well.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Berry said, “I believe RebelMouse has gained so much traction and really grown through the shifting sands around us because Media that is shared via social media is exactly the thing that I am an expert in.”
How it works
With Rebelmouse, the idea is for brands to create a unified approach to their social content. Rather than be restricted by the limitations of individual social media platforms, marketers can now optimize content for each channel, and still have it display in one place. For example, they could use Twitter for witty banter with customers or hashtag replies, Instagram for beautiful images, Tumblr for humorous GIFs and blog posts for press releases. Then they can choose specific content from all of those feeds to display on a single website, with a visual theme and a vanity URL of their choosing.
What this means, is that a marketer can create a standalone website that contains engaging, attractive content, all within a matter of minutes. This helps them to avoid the costly and time-consuming process of updating content on a regular website, and frees them from being at the mercy of web masters or developers.
Pricing
In its simplest form the service is free, and Rebelmouse makes money by showing users ads when they login. For $500 a month, you can get the “Primetime” version which offers more features such as analytics and branding control. And for $5000 a month, you get the Enterprise version, which comes with the services of Rebelmouse’s in-house design and consulting team. With this option, Rebelmouse can manage your account, run native ads and integrate third party analytics into your site. Bagley says the team operates “somewhere between what an agency and a platform provides” and helps brands roll out specific pages for events or campaigns at will.
Who is using it
A number of brands have been using all three Rebelmouse tiers to create microsites or to simply curate their social activity. Modelez VP of consumer engagement Bonin Bough has even gone so far as to say he wants to use Rebelmouse pages to replace the individual websites for all the Mondelez brands. Bough said it was a cheaper, quicker way to make brand websites that were already mobile optimized.
For the launch of its healthy option “Satisfries,” Burger King used Rebelmouse to create a site that housed all the activity tied to its #Satisfried hashtag, while the Bonnaroo music festival used the platform to generate buzz around the musicians performing at the event with #Roo14Wishlist.
Another way brands have been using Rebelmouse pages to generate engagement is with Twitter shoutouts. This is when a brand notifies a social media user that their tweet, image or article has been included on the brand’s page, which usually provokes a pretty positive reaction, along with more sharing. Here’s an example of a Twitter shoutout from the CMT show Orange County Choppers.
While not necessary, there are also plenty of advantages to having the Rebelmouse team around. Last year, the Syfy channel managed to create one of the biggest in-jokes of the year with Sharknado, a so-terrible-its-awesome movie about a tornado full of flying sharks that attack Los Angeles. Rebelmouse, who had been creating other sites for Syfy at the time, saw the huge spike in Twitter activity surrounding Sharknado (at one point, it was 5000 tweets a minute.) Within 20 minutes, it had created a Rebelmouse page, pulling in the best of all the social media activity, all without Syfy commissioning it.
Rebelmouse continues to grow, it generated$100,000 in monthly revenue for the first time in November, and it currently has over 17 million unique visitors.
