Every Internet user is a part of one or the other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and new social networking platforms are launched almost daily. The social networking world is evolving everyday and developers are finding new ways to bring users together. One small start-up has figured out a way to gather new users around a specific type of content and their common interests. Sulia – is a new subject-based social service that let’s you follow topics that you are interested in instead of following other users. For example, you can follow all the content about your favorite local football team instead of separate team-related users.
Headed by CEO Jonathan Glick, Sulia is a tiny start-up from New York and has only 10 employees so far. Most people haven’t even heard of it, but it is generating buzz in all the right circles. Several big investors have started funding the company and 10 million unique users have signed up in less than 12 months after the launch of the site. To put things in perspective – Twitter gathered 5 million users in about 3 years after its inception.
So how does it work?
Sulia is a social networking platform that gathers short form content and organizes it in content channels such as “Christmas”, “Royal Baby”, “Los Angeles”, etc. It gets content in two ways. Firstly, it scours the Internet and takes the first few sentences from news sites and places them in the website. Secondly, Sulia users themselves write into the topic channels directly. So if you like a topic, you can follow all the content published on Sulia about that topic. Moreover in other social networking platforms, a user can distribute his/her content only to his/her friends list, followers, circles, subscribers, fans, etc. The reach on Sulia is wider as anyone interested in that topic can see the content.
The combination of machine learning, human supervision and crowd sourcing has worked wonders for Sulia as it has already attracted famous companies as users and has more than 1000 channels of content.Most internet start-ups create a product or service and then worry about monetizing it. Sulia has the monetizing bit covered! The information gathering system if bound to attract advertising revenue. It is a no brainer that companies would love to advertise on content channels related to them. For example, a channel about books is a great advertising platform for say Barnes & Noble.
This is a great platform for content creators as the website focuses on content. As mentioned above, you can reach a much larger audience on Sulia so businesses are advised to include Sulia in their content and social media marketing strategies.