RebelMouse’s new Discovery tool helps publishers find the right people to promote their stories

Social media startup RebelMouse has created a new tool for publishers — Rebel Discovery, which helps those publishers identify the social media accounts that they should be sharing stories with for maximum impact.

Founder and CEO Paul Berry said that when you publish a story, there are probably many Facebook Pages or Twitter accounts that would be happy to post a link — not because they’re getting paid (although Rebel Discovery can be used to manage those relationships, too), but because they’re hungry for content, it’s relevant to their followers and/or they want to build a relationship with the publisher. The challenge is finding those accounts.

So Rebel Discovery can use a story’s tags to bring up accounts that are relevant to a given topic and have high organic engagement. When publishers have stories they want to promote, they can reach out to the accounts that Rebel Discovery recommends and ask if they’re willing to share.

Rebel Discovery also comes with analytics, so the publisher can see the engagement around each post that an account has shared — both the links to their stories and to everything else.

Berry said RebelMouse originally built this technology as part of Rebel Roar, its publishing platform for sites focused on social media and reader engagement. Now, however, someone who isn’t publishing through Rebel Roar can also use these tools.

“We don’t have to be the CMS anymore,” Berry said. “You can be using WordPress, Drupal, Adobe, it doesn’t matter.”

The company says that in early testing, Rebel Discovery results in an average of 20 percent lift in pageviews while only requiring 75 seconds of an editor’s time per story.

RebelMouse recently added support for publishing Facebook Instant Articles, too.