The social media revolution has undoubtedly broadened our social horizons, but, in my case certainly, it has also broadened the spectrum of online chores to be completed on a daily basis. Keeping up with social media appearances, and the content-hunting which that entails, can easily turn into a full-time vocation.
There are already some apps at hand to ease this burden. Schedulers, like Hootsuite and Buffer, allow you to designate a time at which your posts and tweets should be sent out. Both of these services, and some of their competitors, also offer analytics, meaning you can track how popular each of your missives has been. Services like Feedly make the process of content-gathering easier, although trawling through a catalogue of feeds isn’t a quick process.
A new invite beta-stage startup, called Swayy, aims to streamline these processes into one, simple workflow. Swayy offers a stream of shareable content tailored to your choice of subjects, along with scheduling and analytics options. But can Swayy really be the master of all trades?
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Getting Started
Swayy is not yet fully kitted out with its full feature set, but the advantage of this is that it makes things very simple.
Swayy initially asks you to pick a maximum of five topics to suit your follower-base. The range of topics is quite limited at present, although if you mainly post links to anything computer-related (code, design, etc.), you should find what you need.
The range of topics to follow is rather small at present
Then you just need to sign in to your social accounts – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are the options, thus far – and you’re ready to start sharing.
Content Gathering
Swayy takes a few moments to load its content, but once it does, you’ll have a decent list of stories to choose from. Stories are displayed as cards, in a Masonary-style layout, and it makes Swayy’s content suggestions easy to navigate visually.
After some stats, Swayy offers content on cards
Stories tend to be marked with one of two labels – either Relevant For Your Audience or Engaging Content. The former label indicates a likely match with your audience’s taste – a good fit with the usual subject matter your brand or online persona likes to share. Stories marked with the latter label may not accurately fit your preferred subjects, but they are popular among the wider, general online audience.
Most news gatherers I’ve tried are very inaccurate when it comes to guessing my taste, especially when looking for content from sites I haven’t personally designated as interesting. Prismatic is my current weapon of choice for content-hunting, but Swayy isn’t far away from providing a similar service, and that’s very impressive for what is, in essence, a social media web-app.
The only slight annoyance is the restricted number of stories Swayy offers up. True, if you dismiss a story, Swayy will replace it with a new, different post, but it would be nice to have the option of loading more content on demand.
Sharing: The Name of the Game
In the bottom-right corner of each story is a link to Swayy’s sharing controls.
Swayy’s pop-up, sharing widget has a Hootsuite-like feel to it, but is less cluttered. In fact, other than the message composition window, only Swayy’s (very useful) hashtag suggestions provide any visual distraction.
Swayy’s sharing window is pleasantly uncluttered
It is also nice to see the separation of social networks when you’re composing a message in Swayy. As a result, you’re not going to annoy your Facebook friends/fans/worshippers with @-mentions and hashtags.
If you’re happy to send your choice of content instantly, you can click share. Many social media addicts might want to save some content for later, though, so Swayy’s Share Later function will come in handy. It is not as comprehensive as Hootsuite’s calendar-based scheduling – you can’t schedule for more than 24 hours in advance – but the simplicity of choosing a delay from a menu of presets does keep the sharing process snappy.
Swayy’s share later function is basic, but simple
Stats Galore
Perhaps the most impressive area of Swayy is the Analytics dashboard. In addition to the Timeline, which exhibits basic post-by-post stats from each of your linked social accounts, Swayy provides a huge list of graphs, detailing every conceivable piece of sharing-related data.
Look at all of those beautiful, beautiful stats!
As an avid tweeter, the combined Favourites, Retweets and Replies graph fulfils my inner geek. For those who rely heavily on Facebook, graphs like Facebook Actions vs Reaction Frequency will also provide some statistical nourishment.
Upcoming Features
As Swayy is still in invite beta, not every part of the full, eventual feature list is available yet.
The upcoming features will take Swayy to the next level
The options to add multiple team members and dashboards, for example, are currently not available. When they arrive, however, they will elevate Swayy from being an efficient, but simple, content-sharing workflow, to a fully-fledged social media companion.
Conclusion
Swayy still has some way to go as a service. It provides very relevant content, and most definitely speeds up the content-sharing process. It does, however, lack a full scheduling function, and it doesn’t deliver an abundance of content – not without plenty of clicking, anyway.
Whilst the team behind Swayy have plenty of polishing yet to do, they can be proud of the beta they have created. It works smoothly, and it already admirably performs the content-sharing function for which it was designed. So, although Swayy isn’t a must-have in your social toolbox yet, it’s certainly worth a try if you share content regularly.