[App Fridays] DrumUp aims to solve the ‘chicken-and-egg problem’ of content discovery and marketing

Friday July 31, 2015 , 6 min Read

Discovering relevant content daily, in order to stay on top of your industry, and curating it for an active social media presence, is a time consuming chore for businesses and professionals. Searching for content requires browsing through a number of publications, and sometimes tens of customized searches on search engines. DrumUp aims to tackle this pain point through NLP and machine-learning algorithms, with their app.

What is it?

DrumUp is a mobile and web application that helps users discover and read relevant content from around the web, and share it with their followers and connections on social media. Users can manage multiple Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts from the app and also monitor customizable content streams for each account.

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DrumUp applies natural language processing(NLP) and machine learning algorithms to the content being generated online every day, and then matches the content with a user’s preferences. The app is positioning itself as an end-to-end social media manager. It provides daily content recommendations and gives users the ability to schedule posts for their social media accounts.The startup was co-founded by Vishal Dutta and Sophia Solanki, who also co-founded Godot Media, a five-year-old content services firm. Vishal previously worked with Accenture as a management consultant, and has several years of international experience in Switzerland and the US, where he was involved in product development. He holds a B. Tech. degree from IIT, Delhi, an MBA from IIM, Lucknow, and also studied International Business Management at ESCP Europe Business School, Paris. He currently leads product development at DrumUp.

Sophia has worked with Opera Solutions both in India and the US, and holds B.Tech and M. Tech degrees from IIT, Delhi. At Opera, she consulted large global companies on customer acquisition and loyalty strategy, and operational improvements. She currently looks after marketing for DrumUp. They currently have a team of nine people, with four interns from IIT Madras.

Features

- Custom date-time scheduling option.

- Schedule custom posts for multiple social accounts.

- Easily edit, remove, review suggested posts

- Smart workflow designed to cut down time spent on social media management.

- Connect your blog RSS feed to post latest updates to your social media pages.

Their story so far

DrumUp claims that close to 100,000 posts/month are being scheduled or posted through their platform onto Twitter and Facebook pages, and that they have about 4500+ registered social accounts on their platforms for web and mobile. Most of their current user base is largely from the US, as their content discovery is also focussed on that region currently. But, the team plans to expand to other geographies soon. Sophia added,

DrumUp is for you, if want to track your industry, or share thought-provoking and engaging content to kick-start meaningful conversations with your followers. It is a content discovery app for professionals and businesses to track their industry, get daily doses of news, curate content and keep up their social presence.

The web and mobile versions of the app are currently free to use. DrumUp aims to focus on customer acquisition now and launch paid plans later this year. They also plan to launch new features that will enable users to do more with recommended content. Sofia added,"Going forward, we plan to increasingly focus on our mobile offering, catering to the always on-the-go professional who wants the latest updates literally at their fingertips. We currently have an Android app, and an iOS version is in the works.”

Sector overview

According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, content marketing is in a stage of hyper-growth, and social media is fast becoming the most preferred channel for sharing content. Smaller businesses and professionals generally don’t have suffecient resources, and need solutions to maintain an active social presence.

There are many players in this sector who are trying to make the lives of social media marketing teams easier.Hootsuite, an app for managing social media, has so far raised almost $285M in funding. Tweetdeck on the other hand has raised $5.3M and was acquired by twitter. Founded in 2010, Buffer has so far raised $3.9M in three rounds and helps users curate and share their content.

While the above enterprises focus mainly on content curation and scheduling, DrumUp belives that content discovery is still a largely unresolved problem as it is highly personal and contextual to an individual’s or a business’ interests and needs. Their aim is to make the content consumer a part of the discovery process, while keeping it convenient, not having the consumer search multiple times.

What we liked

The mobile and web versions of the app provide a similar experience. I was able to track different keywords of interest, such as ‘funding’, ‘mobile apps’, ‘startups’ etc. and see relevant content in the ‘Upcoming Posts’ tab. On the mobile app, users can enable or disable notifications, and set the number of posts they wish to schedule in a day (the current limit is five).

Users can also connect to their website’s RSS feed, and also include ‘negative keywords’, to make sure there is no ambiguity. DrumUp explained with an example in their 'Keyword guide' section, “To share content about “Eagles” (birds), you would want to avoid ambiguity that could result in presenting to you stories about sports teams that contain the word “Eagles” in their name. This can be done by setting your negative keywords to “sports, team, football.”

What could be improved?

While the search results are relatively new, adding a ‘time stamp’ i.e. when the story was published by the source, would enhance the appeal and usefulness of the app. After all, content marketing is mainly about fresh new content.Also, currently, both the web and mobile versions of the app display the entire URL of the article below the title, which we feel is not necessary and diminishes the aesthetic appeal. Just mentioning the source website, along with the author name (if possible) would be a better option. Currently, DrumUp’s algorithms only track US news sources, but they have confirmed that they plan to cater to Indian and UK users in the near future.

YS verdict

DrumUp is an interesting app, with a unique value proposition for content marketers, and for people who would like to track genre or keyword specific news and updates. They also have an experienced team on board, who have worked both in India and abroad. It will be interesting to see how DrumUp scales up and increases their user base across different geographies.

Website: DrumUp

What do you think about this app, do let us know in the comments below. Also do check out other apps under our App Fridays and Pursuit of APPiness series.

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