Company: Glipho
Website: www.glipho.com
Founder: Roger Planes
Headquarters: London
Year Founded: 2012
Twitter: twitter.com/gliphoapp
Facebook: facebook.com/glipho
Pinterest: pinterest.com/glipho
Company Overview: Glipho is a new social blogging community that brings the power of social networking to traditional writing.
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By Roger Planes, founder and CEO
Product Overview
Founded by bloggers for bloggers, Glipho is the first true social media community that seamlessly connects Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram to drive traffic and influence from across all social networks to your blog posts—or as we like to call them, ‘Gliphs.’
While over 200 million people worldwide are currently blogging, only a fraction are gaining traction or recognition, leaving the Internet as a vast, disconnected space for so many writers. Glipho is the solution for increasing visibility and connecting the social media dots. The state-of-the-art publishing platform provides all necessary social sharing tools and a ready-made audience of like-minded bloggers and visitors to guarantee your voice gets heard. Posts are grouped by shared topics to bring similar users—aka Gliphers—together to ensure maximum exposure of your Gliph. Gliphers love other Gliphers. Gliphers share articles, compete to be trending writers, ‘like’ each other’s content, and use Glipho’s radical discussion tools to grow the conversation.
Glipho is also a hub for high quality content with video and photos that illustrate interesting and thought-provoking content. With Glipho’s cutting-edge editing technology, adding multimedia to a post is seamless: Gliphers can drag and drop images and video from YouTube, Instagram, Picasa, and Flickr accounts directly into their Gliphs, making it easy to add pizazz and a personal touch to any post.
Once users establish their Glipho account, the extensive social sharing and the optimized infrastructure of the site means search engines rank Gliphs higher than posts on traditional publishing platforms—meaning more people view your profile.
Already have a blog? No problem! Glipho’s unique technology allows users to import existing blogs from other platforms and automatically tag the page in such a way that search engines don’t crawl them—removing any problems with duplicate content for the originating blog.
Founder’s Story
Born in Barcelona, Spain in 1984, I graduated from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) with a master’s in Computer Science. I have been in London, United Kingdom, since 2010, and while working as a software developer, I quickly established myself as a creative and technical force in the online marketing and social media space.
As a developer with a passion for social media strategy, I began to realize that whilst over 200 million people blog globally, the traditional platforms do little to support most writers in gaining traction or visibility. Intent on building a real community and social publishing platform for writers and bloggers, I founded Glipho in mid-2012.
I currently work from dawn until dusk (and dusk until dawn) on Glipho, and I’m a passionate supporter of Barcelona football club from East London.
Marketing/Promotion Strategy
Since the launch of our private beta a few months ago, we have focused on improving the service while growing our community through social media outlets. Glipho is really active in all major networks, achieving a really engaged community in each one of them.
Glipho uses social media to promote the content writers publish in the platform. Helping writers reach bigger audiences while spreading the word about the platform has been our primary goal.
Now, our initial community has massively grown and with the next release of our mobile app we are looking forward to increasing our marketing efforts to make the platform known.
Market Opportunity
While we have completely changed the way we use the Internet during the last decade, traditional blogging has remained the same as it was all those years ago.
There are more than 200 million blogs in the world and only five percent of those are getting traction and engagement. With blogging increasingly seen as a singular and lonely activity, Glipho unites writers. Its network fosters a writing community and delivers to those writers an audience.
Social publishing is the future of blogging. While there are some platforms out there experimenting with it, no platform yet has taken our writer’s-focused approach or gets close to Glipho in terms of features and what can be achieved with it.
How We Differentiate From the Competition
Glipho is a community and a social publishing engine as well as a blogging platform. Traditional blogging platforms provide a site or space to blog but interaction with the rest of the Internet or other users on the site is limited or complicated.
The fact that writers can import blogs from other blogging platforms is unique.
Unlike old school platforms, Gliphers create a profile and not a blog. They then write Gliphs on their profile. Gliphers join the community and get writing! No design, no branding—traditional platforms look terrible unless you happen to be an expert graphic designer (most bloggers aren’t).
Glipho is all about traffic and audience generation. Traditional platforms don’t focus on bringing readers to posts. In Glipho this is baked right in with relational content, onsite followers and powerful social sharing applications. The average Gliph gets over 150 views. No traditional platforms have metrics that can compete.
Whilst traditional platforms allow comments often powered by clunky third party applications, Glipho’s proprietary discussion system encourages real community engagement and discussion.
A sophisticated and unique system allows Gliphers to create alternative content versions (reviews and recipes are particularly popular).
Highly Search Engine Optimized—the relational nature of the content (Gliphs are all connected to other Gliphs), extensive social sharing and the optimized infrastructure of the site means search engines rank Gliphs higher than posts on traditional publishing platforms.
Business Model
At this stage we are privately funded and we are only focused on refining the platform to provide the service bloggers want and growing the existing community of writers.
Current Needs
Glipho will be raising a new round of capital in the next few months. Once we have done the new round of capital we will be looking forward to expand our development team.
Glipho – www.glipho.com
