Creating Social Hubs for Brands: Q&A With Tint Founder

Tim Sae Koo founded social media startup Hypemarks in 2012 with three fellow graduates from the University of California. Initially funded by StartEngine and Bill Gross, they’ve since repositioned the company to Tint and relocated to San Francisco, where they can focus on reaching out to brand managers.

Tint has helped more than 4,000 brands create social hubs on their websites with plans to expand into Asia.

Mark Schreiber: What is Tint and how does it compare to other widgets/APIs in the social media space?

Tim Sae Koo: Tint lets brands beautifully display social feeds on their sites.

The main difference between us and other social media widgets is that with Tint you can display your own feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., as well as other brands’ feeds, and even hashtagged posts. After you’ve decided what social accounts you want to connect, you can customize the design and fit it anywhere on your website.

MS: How can brands use Tint to engage their customers?

TSK: Many brands share content on their social networks but neglect their websites, where most customers find and make their purchases. We believe the more curated content you can provide your visitors, the more they can engage with you and trust doing business with your brand.

You can even use Tint to display all Instagram photos or Twitter tweets that have a hashtag of your brand name. That way you can display all your fan-generated content directly onto your site and leverage your existing customers’ content to prospective customers.

For instance, we used Tint to display all the Instagram photos the world was taking and hastagging #chinesenewyears and #lunarnewyear on our blog. We shared it out to some friends, and it generated over 2,000 extra visitors to our website.

MS: Can companies use Tint to generate sales leads?

TSK: Many e-commerce sites, bands, artists, restaurants, and other small-to-medium sized businesses are now running marketing campaigns using Tint.

When customers or fans hashtag an Instagram photo with the brand’s name it shows up on the website, which increases engagement and generates sales leads. Our technology has proven to increase traffic by 10 percent, time spent on site by 20 percent, and social engagement by 15 percent.

We ran some tests with two clients, Idealab and Toni Braxton, and each saw an average of 10 percent increase in traffic, 15 percent increase in time spent on site, and a 12 percent decrease in bounce rate after using Tint on their sites for a few weeks.

The reason for these beneficial changes were that they essentially turn their static sites from an informational one to a dynamic site displaying social content for visitors to engage with.

Visitors saw Idealab’s page as a source for startup news and Toni Braxton’s site as a way to keep up with all her updates. This got people to visit more often, stay longer, and engage more.

MS: You recently relocated your team from Los Angeles to San Francisco and wrote an interesting blog post about the advantages of being in the Bay Area. Will this help you in the Asia market as well?

TSK: So far we have helped over 4,000 brands create social hubs on their websites, and we’re certainly looking to expand into Asia.

We currently have clients in Japan, China, Thailand, and Korea, including:

http://www.cove-tokyo.com/

http://www.snaphotosociety.com/#!news/cznh

http://www.sportsline.com.hk/

http://www.tpfc.org.hk/

http://www.kamogawapower.com/

If any companies in Asia want to try Tint, please email me at [email protected] so I can showcase you to the rest of our community!