You'd think that with 90 percent of businesses on Facebook, it would be as easy as posting a selfie on the site to get hold of good content. "The No. 1 pain point businesses have in maintaining their social presence on Facebook is finding the right content," says Kylie Lakevold, co-founder of TinyTorch, the newest player in the content discovery arena.
The platform ups the game by offering the scheduling and posting capabilities of Hootsuite combined with crowd-sourced visual content similar to Pinterest. Lakevold says businesses can login to TinyTorch to find and schedule a month's worth of industry-relevant and engaging visual content to post to their social pages in less time than it takes to brew a pot of coffee.
At one time, Lakevold and her co-founder, Jon Bradshaw, were taking care of more than 40 company Facebook pages at one time. "It was difficult to find enough unique content to satisfy the needs of all these different companies," Lakevold says. "We would spend hours searching Pinterest, Google images, and blogs looking for content and pictures to post. It was time-consuming to search all of the different sites, and there wasn't a central location to discover relevant content, organize all of our post ideas, and schedule content to post."
Anyone with more than one Facebook page to manage can relate to this. It's the challenge that lit Lakevold and Bradshaw's fires to build TinyTorch in 2013. "TinyTorch solves all of the struggles I have personally experienced in my past marketing and business-owner roles," she says. "I have managed more social media accounts than I can count, and every time the biggest frustration has been locating relevant content to share."
Aside from having a large library of content for businesses to choose from, TinyTorch is also a distribution channel for content creators. "We allow content marketers, businesses, and graphic designers to upload their content to industry-specific channels for other businesses to share," she says. "This helps us double down on the content that we can offer businesses and helps other social marketers distribute their content to targeted audiences."
Unlike competitors who only provide businesses with trending news content, TinyTorch recognizes that image-based content has the furthest reach on social networks.
"Photos get 53 percent more likes, 104 percent more comments, and 84 percent more click-throughs than a link or text-based update," says Lakevold, who has been working in the design and marketing industry for more than 10 years where she has worked with and developed several globally recognized brands. "Our content is designed to engage your social following, but we also give businesses photo editing tools and content ideas so that they can easily create their own custom visual content."
One of the platform's users signed up for the 14 days of free social content that TinyTorch offers and started sharing it on all of his social pages. "I've never had so much interaction with my posts," says Daniel Falabella, founder of Prefundia. "This content has received the most likes on Facebook and retweets on Twitter that I've ever had."
What began as a way to discover social content for Facebook pages will eventually gain ground in all major social networks, including Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Future development also includes more advanced analytics tools; more sophisticated scheduling capabilities; and keyword-based, content posting automation. TinyTorch is also working on developing a mobile app for social content creation on the go.
"In semi-stealth mode, we easily acquired our first 1,000 user registrations, and over 500 businesses signed up to receive 14 days of free social content," Lakevold says. "Now we are focused on acquiring our next 1,000 content partnerships and letting more users into the app."
TinyTorch aims to be a one-stop-shop for all your social marketing needs. "There are so many social marketing tools out there, but none have satisfied all the needs of a social marketer," says Lakevold, who is also a TinyTorch hacker developing both the platform and content with other designers and developers. "We see TinyTorch as being a fantastic content distribution channel as well. We want brands big and small to see TinyTorch as a vehicle that helps their messages go viral."
Reserve your spot in the TinyTorch beta by visiting http://tinytorch.com, and while you wait for your spot, visit http://tinytorch.com/free-content/ to start receiving 14 days of free visual content.
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Social Startups, an exclusive column for Social Media Today by Shay Moser, covers a wide variety of social startups-from apps that make sense of opinions to platforms that help publish and gather your best content. Tell us what profiles you'd like to read about on Social Media Today's Social Startups column or share your social startup story. Contact Shay via Twitter at: @ShayMoser