Tel Aviv’s Influence on Swayy Founders
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should know by now that content has become paramount in the race for being noticed online. While social media is still important, it is shifting, even maturing. It’s not just for humorous quips anymore.
Looking for the content to fill your social media channels can be a challenge, especially if you don’t have the time to create it yourself. That’s where Swayy comes in.
Longtime friends Ohad Frankfurt, Swayy’s CEO, and Lior Degani, VP of Marketing, created Swayy with Oz Katz, chief technology officer, and Shlomi Babluki, chief scientist, all former alumni of The Elevator, an investment vehicle for early-stage startups, in Tel Aviv. Founded in March 2013, Swayy was built to help brands and social media managers manage their social content strategy, by tailoring the content their audience is interested in consuming. It launched for private, invitation only beta testing and launched on a public beta in September 2013.
Ohad Frankfurt, Swayy CEO
“I have always been a big fan of technology and always came up with ideas for new products and services I wanted to build,” Frankfurt said. “Luckily for me I now have the best team in the world, and that helps us turn our ideas into real, working products.”
Swayy began after a trip back to Tel Aviv from New York when the group decided they wanted to start a new product. They noticed that their community manager spent about two to three hours per day searching for relevant content to share on the company’s social media pages. They took a weekend to build her a solution that turned into the Swayy of today. Everyday, the app they created would send her a few articles from several sources that were hand-picked.
“We immediately noticed that she was free to handle other tasks instead of searching for content every day,” Frankfurt said. “We then talked with a lot of people and realized this was something worth building.”
Frankfurt and Degani studied together in high school and participated in other tech initiatives together before starting Swayy. Both were in the military in Israel as all Israeli citizens enter the army at 18. They both gained much of their technology knowledge while enlisted.
Lior Degani, Swayy VP of Marketing
“I learned a lot in the army, from the basics to more sophisticated intelligence systems,” Degani said. “Right after discharging from the army, I continued work in a local Hi-tech company.” From there, Degani went on to college in Tel Aviv to become an industrial engineer and has been working in tech for the past 10 years, which was useful experience for starting Swayy.
Since September, Swayy has gained 20,000 users. Social media managers who oversee multiple accounts, brands and agencies, now recommend more than 4 Million pieces of content from Swayy each month. In addition, around 65 percent of all registered users are subscribed to Swayy’s Daily content recommendation newsletter.
But don’t call it a social media scheduling platform. “We’re a content sharing platform that’s more for the content marketing world. We’re not trying to replace sites like Hootsuite,” Degani said.
He added that Swayy has developed a special Natural Language Processing mechanism, which analyzes more than 10,000 pieces of content each day, extracting the topics each article is about. In addition, this mechanism adds social trends, popularity and other additional factors based on a user’s audience.
For the social aspect, Swayy also analyzes a user’s social community, followers and fans, understanding which content is the most relevant and interesting for them, then match you with hundreds of articles a day for you to easily share using the Swayy’s dashboard.
For a social media manager’s all-in-one suit, Swayy provides detailed analytics, trending topics, a smart share widget, multiple dashboards, team collaboration and other features.
In January, Swayy launched a “Swayy for Chrome” extension, which lets users share any articles found across the web, similar to Houtsuite’s “Hootlet.” The sharing experience from the extension is the same as if you were on the website itself. From the extension users can:
- Post to multiple social networks;
- Schedule posts for every hour;
- Add an author’s Twitter handle, and trending Hashtags; and
- Once posted, Swayy for Chrome recommends more relevant articles for you to share with your audience.
This month, the company launched an advanced LinkedIn integration that allows users to share content to LinkedIn groups and company pages.
Degani said users are finding Swayy via media mentions, referral programs within the app and good old fashioned word-of-mouth.
“We’ve gotten a lot of positive response,” Degani said. “The fun part, when your users are social media managers, is that they share their thoughts on, well, social media.”
Photos and logo courtesy of Swayy.
Feature image courtesy of Eran Chesnutt.
