Listen to this articleSydney based startup QuickShouts is developing solution to connect businesses with social media influencers. Below is recent interview with Chase Hattie, CEO of QuickShouts:
Q: What is QuickShouts and what was your inspiration for making it?
A: QuickShouts is a unique global marketplace that brings together advertisers with social media influencers who have built communities of millions of loyal fans. Advertisers can purchase social media postings that are injected right inside YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Blogs and other message streams to these loyal and targeted followers. Since the messages are right in the social streams, they receive more attention, get shared to fan’s networks and have the potential to go viral.
The inspiration spurred from an experience one of our co-founders – Veronica Chanthavong, had when trying to find bloggers and social media leaders to promote her iPhone app. She was thrilled when she received an ROI of about 1000% after paying a makeup artist to review the app on her blog, but found that the process of finding someone to facilitate this type of online promotion was painful and draining. Knowing that what we now call a ‘QuickShout’ can be such an effective method of marketing; we decided we wanted to create an online marketplace that will make this process easy and accessible for others.
Q: What is the main benefit for users?
A: For social media influencers and bloggers, not only does it provide them with an extra way to make money from their hard earned following but it also provides them with topics to blog/talk about that are relevant to their niche market.
Those on the purchasing side of a QuickShout are able to benefit from the social proof that is demonstrated by having well respected figures of their target market promote, endorse or review their offering. It’s much more engaging to their target market than conventional options as most social media advertising is wasted, because it is an interruption of the social stream, not really a part of it. People eventually learn to tune those ads out. QuickShouts on the other hand is an affordable, engaging and buzz-generating way to promote.
Q: How big your team is at the moment?
A: We currently have a team of four co-founders. Veronica Chanthavong is the brainchild and Marketing Director, James Gatward is our Sales Manager, Blaine Hattie is our Developer and I am the CEO.
Q: What is your monetization plan?
A: We charge a 10% fee to the seller on each completed transaction.
Q: Are you looking for partnership opportunities?
A: We’re open to anything at this stage. We invite all fellow start-ups to get in touch if they feel that there could be a synergic effect between our businesses. It’d be especially cool to work with other start-ups that are focused on using social media in new and disruptive ways.
Q: What are your plans for the future? When do you plan to launch it?
A: In the short term we’re focused on spreading the word and gaining as much feedback as possible from alpha customers. We plan to release a public-beta version of QuickShouts within the next 6-8 weeks.
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