RebelMouse for Content Curation [Review]

RebelMouse, one of Business Insider’s Best Startups of 2012, allows you to collate content from your various social media channels. But what does RebelMouse offer the small business owner or solopreneur?

Less than a year old and extremely buzz worthy, RebelMouse has been used by big names like Time.com, WSJ, Techcrunch and ESPN with stupendous success. Combining content from different social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest etc. helps popular brands paint a holistic picture of their story. Updates happen in real time whenever you post anything to your social media channels.

How does RebelMouse fit into a brand’s social media strategy?

Social Media Strategy Across Channels

Every social media network has its own unique advantage. A well defined social media strategy will have a different objective for each channel, and will design content for it accordingly. A brand might use Twitter for helpful links to educational content, updates, and customer support; Facebook for special offers and coupons;YouTube for product videos and ads; Pinterest for photographs and so on. You get the idea!

A tool like RebelMouse can pull all these updates from various channels and lets you decide how you want to display it. Any customer going to the RebelMouse page for that business will see a cohesive picture of content from different channels in one place. This will help communicate your brand message to your customers, without requiring them to hop from one social network to another to look you up.

Since everyone’s time is invaluable, you could earn some brownie points by making it easy for your customer to look you up.

RebelMouse for Small Business

RebelMouse has many attractive features like a WordPress plugin, design customizations that let you add your own HTML code, ability to add more than one user, choice of email notifications and a ‘Stick’ button that allows you to add content to your page anytime (somewhat similar to the Buffer tool on your browser bar).

Here are five RebelMouse features I have chosen that can really benefit a small business owner in content curation.

1) Tweets, Retweets etc.

RebelMouse gives you the option of displaying only your Tweets, or a combination of Tweets and Retweets from your account. You can also display your complete Twitter timeline if you like. Being able to choose this gives you a lot of flexibility.

And this option can be changed any time. So you could include RTs in a week where you mostly just Retweeted links. You can go back to a ‘Tweet only’ setting when you are providing high value as part of your Tweets.

Since it is difficult to be sharing something spectacular all the time, this can give you some respite when you are in a jam.

2) Tags and Filters

You can add tags to filter your Twitter feed so that RebelMouse will pick up tweets with a certain tag or keyword. This is great when you have a special tag for a certain event, such as a Fashion Week or a conference. Anything you Tweet using that tag will make its way to your page.

For example, a small business such as a boutique can use a hashtag for a fashion week to their advantage. Since most content related to the event will appear on their RebelMouse page, they can portray that they are ‘in’ with what’s hot ( or ‘haute’) in the fashion world with very little effort on their part. A customer in a place like Paradise, CA will be thrilled to know that she buys her clothes from someone who’s familiar with the latest ramp fashion from New York or Milan.

3) Adding Sub Pages

Your RebelMouse page can have different sub pages. This is useful to classify content and put related stuff in one place. For example, we have a sub page for social media, another for WordPress, and so on, because these are the topics we write about most.

You can even add a URL from your website and add it as a tab on your RebelMouse page. This can be a different way of drawing traffic to your services page or your special offers. What small business owner would pass up another avenue to gain more visibility for their products?

4) Adding Feeds and Accounts

As a small business owner, you are always in a time crunch. If you’re like us, one of your challenges is to provide quality content consistently. RebelMouse lends a hand here by allowing you to add RSS and other feeds to your account.

Adding a feed from someone like Business2community will give your customer direct access to newly released quality content. You can even filter the feed to only grab what is most pertinent to your business. Many big sites will already have different feeds based on topic.

Choosing a feed from an industry leader in your field is a good idea. Customers like to know that you are aware of the big names and take inspiration from them.

5) Editing Capability

This is the most valuable feature for content curation, in my opinion. RebelMouse lets you delete certain items from your page. It also allows you to freeze or pin items to the top for a given duration.

As a small business owner, I do not want to handle the overhead needed to maintain a separate Twitter account for my business. So my Tweets include personal messages or observations that may not have a place on my brand page. For example, a recipe I shared with my followers appeared on RebelMouse among a bunch of other business posts. Or my comments on ‘Argo’ might too. Since I am using my RebelMouse page to talk about my brand, these kind of messages seem misplaced.

I was glad to see that I could remove any message I wanted from my RebelMouse page very easily. Similarly I could easily freeze an update asking people to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

If you haven’t tried RebelMouse already, I urge you to try it out. Signing in is easy with your existing Twitter or Facebook account. The Dashboard is intuitive and you should be able to build a page to your liking. I am eager to know how easy or tough you find it.

Does this mean RebelMouse is perfect? How does it compare to other content curation tools out there? My next post will be about my wishlist of features for RebelMouse.