Maintaining the right (and active) social media persona can be an overwhelming job for influencers and brands, from switching across platforms to make the same post and then keeping track of their respective traction. And that’s exactly what the Karachi-based Socialchamp.io wants to make easier.

The platform is pretty simple. Open the website/mobile app/Chrome extension, sign up with your personal credentials for a trial period (no need for a credit card), and start connecting all your social media profiles - from Facebook to Pinterest.

Under the publish module, you can write, queue, schedule or post all content and choose the accounts they should go from. It also allows users to auto connect with RSS feeds of publications or upload in bulk by adding a comma separated value (CSV) file with the text, year, month, date, time and anything else relevant.

They also have team features (relevant to major handles like the President of the United States or Prime Minister’s Office) that, among other things, give limited access to the holder. In addition, there is the new ‘engage’ module (currently in beta) that brings all social media customer service channels under a single platform so the brand representatives can keep track of queries and answer them from one place. Finally, you have the analytics part that breaks down performance - such as traction - of posts and different social media using charts and downloadable PDFs.

“I was running my third startup, after the first two failed, and was looking for social media strategies to boost its reach and started reading this book by Guy Kawasaki — an American marketing specialist and venture capitalist. It talked about how you can optimise your audience by repeating posts and that seemed pretty interesting so I tried it manually at first and then my co-founders and I wrote a basic code to automate the process.

“After that, we reached out to Kawasaki and got connected with him, and he became a mentor to us... even sponsored the ticket to a conference in the US where we realised that our social media tools gained more popularity than RemindzApp [the third startup]. So we finally decided to shut that down and focus on Social champ as a standalone product in 2017,” founder Chief Executive Sameer Ahmed Khan recalls.

Khan is joined by Zohaib Ahmed Shakir, the Chief Technology Officer, and Shakir Ghani, the Chief Operating Officer, as co-founders. The trio go way back to university where they were batch mates and Social Champ is the fourth startup of all three.

The startup has a subscription model with pricing plans based on the usage: starting from $10 a month for professionals that comes with 10 accounts and 300 pending posts to $199 for agencies allowing 100 social media profiles and 2,000 posts. Moreover, Social Champ raised $100,000 seed money in January 2019 from the Oman Technology Fund and is now in the process of closing another small round to boost up spending on user acquisition and tech.

While the market has plenty of social media management tools, Khan feels his competition is with Buffer, Hootsuite and AgoraPulse - three western companies who have raised almost $10 million, $300m and $19m, respectively through some combination of debt and equity.

However, Khan is confident that their product and rates put them in a pretty good position. “Our pricing is quite cheap and we have some features that are not available with anyone else, such as repetition,” he says, adding “Even the user interface is easier than the others.”

But the challenging bit is not the number of players in the market, rather it’s the structure. “This is a low-cost industry which leads to a high churn rate so we are trying to raise our average revenue per customer. For that, we are introducing different add-ons and bringing more agencies on board as the monthly value is much higher in that segment,” says Khan.

That problem is even more pronounced in the local market. “In a year, we had 4.7 per cent of paying customers and 8.91pc of sign-ups from Pakistan while currently they account for only 0.5pc of subscribers,” the founder tells Dawn.

“Other than the general culture of avoiding paid products, the domestic payments system is quite underdeveloped. For example, banks require credit cards to be activated before every transaction, which is fine when it’s a one-time thing but becomes an issue when the client has to do that literally every month,” he adds. And this is why the startup has targeted the western markets like the United States from the very beginning, where Khan says the conversion rate is much higher.

The writer is member of staff:

m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com

Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2020