Tagly App: The Anti-Selfie?

A new app is poised to move social content marketing away from user-generated content and put the power in the hands of brands themselves.

TechCrunch brings news out of SXSW that Tagly — an app that launched at the event on Friday (March 11) — is positioning itself as the first social platform that is dedicated to brand-generated content, bucking the current trend in the social marketing space that puts a great amount of focus on attempting to link brand-related material to what consumers already share on social media.

To date, the Tagly app has generated $2 million in seed funding from IZI Mobile, shares the outlet.

“Brands are focused on creating beautiful content that’s valuable to consumers, but most of it now is lost in our long social media feeds, alongside posts of cats and family updates,” Mark Alhermizi, Tagly’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

The outlet reports that Alhermizi’s inspiration for the app came in 2014, when Facebook changed its algorithm that greatly reduced the visibility for brand posts in a user’s News Feed and left brands having to plead with their followers to turn on notification settings so that the brand’s posts would not be invisible to them.

According to TechCrunch, Alhermizi attests that Tagly can help brands overcome that challenge, being that the app is a social channel for direct marketing that users can sign up for (to keep up with news about their preferred brands) just as they do with newsletters and catalogs.

“Instead of wasted impressions, consumers select categories they actively want to follow: events, deals, news and trends. This gives all brands in the platform access to targeted engagement and 100 percent organic reach,” Alhermizi remarked to the outlet.

TechCrunch notes that while the brands in Tagly’s purview are currently in the fashion and lifestyle spaces, the team behind the app has plans to expand to other verticals in short time. And although it is limited to Facebook content for the time being because, as the outlet shares, Instagram’s API prevents brands from leveraging its content, the Tagly team is also planning to launch an online dashboard that will allow brands to bypass Instagram altogether and create content directly on Tagly.