If you’ve seen the Condé Nast’s website recently, you’ve seen the Socius platform in action. The startup just raised $400k from 500 Startups‘ Nordic Fund and Raa Invest to pour fuel on its social storytelling and curation tool, helping brands leverage the crowd to tell stories from all angles. By using its technology, the idea is that brands will be able to maximize user-generated content, both from a content and from a revenue point of view.
Powerful curation tools help brands have near-instantaneous conversations with their customers
Socius is already in cozying up with an impressive array of early customers such as Visit Norway (the company’s home country), LondOnTheInside, the Berlinale, Peerspace and, of course, the already mentioned home page of publishing giant Condé Nast.
In addition to being a tool for publishers, Socius is gunning for rapid expansion to help other brands, musicians (such as Courtney Barnett) and organization tell their stories. It further hints that it is aiming to expand its services to be better targeted to PR companies and social media agencies, to fuel user-generated content campaigns.
The tool helps publishers run interactive content marketing campaigns, increase advertising capacity and massively engage customer engagement. Setting up a new, highly customizable campaign, the company claims, takes a matter of hours.
“We have evolved from being a simple social media aggregator,” says Daniel Butler, CEO of Socius, “to a tool solving the major challenges in the publishing industry. We are laser-focused on monetization and return on investment by offering contextually relevant native ads and call-to-actions that are adblock resistant.”
The company claims its adverts have a ten times higher click-through rate than the industry average, due to better integration into the content.