Social content aggregation service Rebelmouse is reinventing itself as a publishing platform for media outlets and content marketers.
With its new features, Rebelmouse has ambitions to be more than just a cool looking place where you can collect and display all your social media content. By adding writing and rich media upload tools to its existing content curation abilities, Rebelmouse is taking on WordPress and Tumblr to become a full-fledged content management system.
Here are the new features Rebelmouse is touting in its blog post about the new platform:
– Pull in the best image or GIF automatically. Type your headline and RebelMouse will automatically help you find the perfect photo to go with it to make your post pop. Just type a headline and a related GIF or image will populate the post, making your post stand out with stunning full-width photographic images.
– Dynamically add content, videos, photos and more as you’re typing. Expand any link into a rich media addition to your post. Bring in Tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram pics, YouTube and Vine videos and just about anything by pasting the link in the post.
– Smart cropping of photos to work in every screen size and placement. Our cropping algorithms choose the right crop size for images in different window sizes and placement. Then, to top it off, our crop tool lets you change these crops to fit perfectly with your image.
– See a live, gorgeous preview as you’re editing your post. As you’re typing, you’ll see the post just the way it will look live on your site. Our new post aesthetic makes your content look as good as it deserves to.
– Easily share your post anywhere. When you’re done creating content, we make it easier to share it anywhere on the social web and your site.
Here’s what the new publishing dashboard looks like:
Along with media outlets and news publications, Rebelmouse is targeting the new breed of digital content creators, i.e. marketers. It was was already a popular platform for social media managers who needed an easy way to collect and display user generated content for the brand they worked for. Now, Rebelmouse wants brands to use its service for a range of content publishing ideas, including anything from a specific campaign microsite to being a full fledged company website. Founder and CEO Paul Berry spoke to GigaOM about why Rebelmouse could take on the current CMS giants of Tumblr and WordPress.
Our competition is really just people who build their own thing — hiring developers to hack a Tumblr blog or whatever. But it’s really hard. And WordPress is a fantastic platform, it’s totally awesome, but you get a very thin product if you don’t put in a lot of development time to make it do what you want it to for the social web.
By setting up a really easy user interface that’s already optimized for mobile sharing, Berry is looking to attract the non-technical personnel who work on websites and content creation. In addition, the platform is giving them the technical tools they need, such as in-depth analytics for user behavior on their site.
From GigaOM:
We can give them stats on depth of scroll, amount of time on mouseover, velocity alerts and so on, tracking all of their social content. We can track retweets, so we can move a story to the top of most popular if it’s doing well, and we can generate daily email summaries of the most popular content — and then brands can take that and use it in advertising campaigns.
Becoming a publishing platform is a logical competitive move for Rebelmouse, as it already existed in a crowded content curation field. It was competing with the likes of Offerpop, Mass Relevance and Postano who all provide some variation of gathering user generated content on social media networks and using them for brand marketing. By becoming a CMS, it’s heading straight into another fiercely competitive market, but if it can differentiate itself with superior design, ease-of-use and proven engagement results, it could become a very important player very quickly.
