SocialBook is a
social media scheduling and tracking tool that helps marketers publish posts on all major social media platforms.
Heidi Yu, SocialBook’s CEO, kindly agreed to give us more information about the company, its mission, and the future of the industry.
Please Present SocialBook To Our Audience
SocialBook is a California based software as a service platform that helps content creators run their own online businesses easily and efficiently. On the flip side, we also help brands to find the right creators to fit their marketing campaign needs. We are like a middleman between the two, to ensure both sides are as happy as possible. Moreover, we offer a variety of tools on our platform and website tailored to both to creators and to brands. For the creator side of our website, we offer tools for them to grow their following, and to pitch to brands more effectively. For the brand side of our website, we offer an entire database of over 30 Million creators which they can sort through using various filters to find the perfect one.
What’s Your Story? What Sparked The Idea, And How Has It Evolved So Far?
In the early 2010’s we started as an ecommerce company selling mobile accessories called Pocomaru. The idea sparked when we asked some of our customers to send in videos and pictures of their new purchases that fit with their daily outfits. This was essentially influencer marketing before it became popular. This was prior to 2014. Since they shared these photos on their social media platforms and tagged us, it only led to so many more sales! This was the start of SocialBook. We realized we had to find more people to do this but that were better qualified and had an audience.
SocialBook then evolved into a data analysis tool for social media creators such as YouTubers, Instagrammers, and Tiktokers. When creators connect their social media accounts to SocialBook, we can tell them how much their accounts are worth and which creators are similar to them and which brand collaborations could be best for their audience’s demographic. Due to us having an extensive database, brands started reaching out to us and asking us if we could run campaigns for them. Our team rose to the challenge, then by using our own software, we were able to match the best influencers with the best brands. During each campaign, our campaign managers were innovating and making the best CRM tools alongside our developer team to ensure the optimal delivery of campaign results.
We’ve built a platform that has various utilities! Not only have we made a huge database, but also tools to search for the right creator, the ability to track campaigns and performance, product shipping and receiving, and more! We ended up adding all these tools so that everyone can use it in their own way.
Through internal innovation, we have saved each of our campaign managers at least 4 hours a day by putting things on their spreadsheets while analyzing and updating data daily. This allows them to focus more on productive things and spend more time with their families. It’s been proven through internal use, so we just added it to our software package for more teams to use to save everybody time on their campaign work.
Lastly, we allow our users to send inquiries if they’d like us to create more useful features for them. This is where we’re at now and we’re sure that we’ll continue to evolve moving forward too! We’ve been on this path of evolution to provide more tools and services for creators to use with us. All while using our own tools and improving our own campaign management for brands that reach out to us.
What Services Do You Offer?
We help creators make better content, grow their audience, discover more brand collaborations, and open up their own online shops to sell merchandise and digital assets. Some of our other tools help creators make the best thumbnails with our Thumbnail Maker. Another is to help optimize their SEO, and understand statistics about their audience.
In addition, we have our new platform called Link.One which is for creators to use and host all their links, open their own merchandise shop, and to gain commission from their viewer’s purchases. This helps creators to keep making money for doing what they love, which is making content.
On top of content creation tools, we also have tools for brands. We offer a bulk email tool so brands can reach out to many influencers at once which saves time. We also have a database for sourcing influencers quickly, and efficiently. This helps all marketing teams save time and money sourcing influencers for their influencer marketing campaigns. We also have campaign managers ready to manage campaigns for brands, businesses and services!
What Is The Mission Of SocialBook?
At SocialBook our mission is to have every single content creator making money from doing what they love, which is making content. We also want to be the leading service for brands to be able to quickly find their perfect influencers with the perfect demographics to fit their campaigns and have successful marketing campaigns each and every time. This also feeds back into our first mission. We want to amplify influencer marketing as an industry and a career choice!
What Makes You Stand Out From The Competition?
There are a few things that make us stand out from the competition. One of these things being that our database of over 30 million influencers updates in real time. No other database of influencers does this, it updates their follower count, audience demographic, estimated pay and more as they are incrementing. So the data our customers get is the most accurate on the market when searching for that perfect influencer to fit the campaign.
We, as an international company, extend our reach both in employment and the services we provide. This sets us apart significantly from the majority of regionally-based companies. Remarkably, our client base spans across four major continents! We maintain a dedicated localization team and possess a deep cultural understanding of the brands in the international markets where we conduct business.
Lastly, our eCommerce integration allows us to track sales and give commission quickly to the influencers that use our services such as Link.One. This sales performance tracking allows for faster execution for all who are involved. This speeds up the process of influencers working with us and getting paid, while also promoting our products and services in exchange.
Our business model is also quite different from traditional SaaS companies. Instead of relying on just one single revenue stream (like what has been suggested by the start up textbook), we actually have multiple revenue streams and serve both brands and influencers. From offering influencer marketing software like SocialBook, to a link hosting tool like LinkOne, to a YouTube SEO tool, and a design tool like PhotoStudio. We even have an app called Pic2Cartoon, and finally we even have our own eCommerce shop called SocialShop that sells popular products directly to customers! We have the ability to pivot, due to our adaptive nature. This essentially allows us to strive through the pandemic and other economic changes. In fact, our revenue has increased by 5X and was named as an Inc 5000 company this year!
In Your Opinion, What Trends Are Going To Shape The Future Of Your Industry?
In 2012, influencer marketing wasn’t even a concept. But over the years as attention has transferred from radio and television over to computers and mobile phones, it’s been evident that if you have a business, you need to be visible where people are looking. Since 2014 the world population that owns a mobile phone has grown. Today, according to a study recently published, 83% of the world owns a mobile phone (https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world) most studies show higher figures, upwards to 85% and even 90%.
Due to most of the population owning a mobile phone, right now, Youtube has 2 Billion viewers on its platform. That’s more than 20% of the entire planet. Tik Tok gets 1 Billion monthly viewers, again a significantly large portion of the planet. These trends in real time are shaping the future of our industry. More and more people are becoming content creators and influencers, it’s becoming more and more of a viable career path that we couldn’t even dream of in the 80’s and 90’s. Due to this, a staggering number of businesses will continue to market online and on these social media platforms. They will utilize the increasing number of influencers and content creators that will continue to spring up. Especially as more and more of the population owns a mobile phone or PC, as the technology becomes more affordable and it becomes more of a necessity. In most Asian countries, you can’t buy food without a phone. This is true in Vietnam and in China so far. Again as society continues to grow in this direction, more and more of our lives and attention will be on our phones and our industry will continue to grow.
Lastly, Any Exciting News Or Developments That You Would Like To Share About SocialBook?
We are very excited to share a few of our tools and features with you!
If you are a content creator of any size or niche, definitely look into Link.One. It’s a link hosting service where you get your own mini website made and can host all your links to different socials for free. Moreover, you can host your own little merch shop and get commission from sales from every purchase one of your viewers makes! This allows you to continue just focusing on making content and doing what you love, while passively earning income.
Another platform we have for creators is our Launcher, it’s a marketplace for creators to browse and accept brand offers that they believe will fit their content and audience. It’s good because here the brands come to you and they have a need that you can fulfill as a creator. They accept influencers of all sizes, styles and niches so there is something for everyone and a great opportunity to earn some income.
Also for creators we have tons of tools which can amplify your reach if searching for brands or more deals. This brings up our free to use Photo Studio and Media Kit tool. Photo Studio is a free photo editing suite that allows you to make thumbnails, edit photos without paying for hefty software. Our media kit tool allows you to create using a template a media kit! This shows brands your follower count, what your content and audience is all about, and it’s really appealing and professional which is more likely to get you a brand deal in the long run when you pitch it this way.
Lastly we’re currently helping selected Instagram creators to create their Instagram native shops and add their favorite Amazon products to the shops and earn high commissions! This again will allow these creators to update their shops and encourage their audience to make purchases based on their content. For example a fashion influencer might post her outfit of the week and add a link to each item on her IG shop for her viewers to also buy her outfit! The Instagrammer will get commission based on sales and both viewer and creator are happy! If you think you’d be a good fit for this, we’re always open to people reaching out, otherwise please check out all of our free tools and services.
