What is Pheed?

Laura and Helen from ASocialMediaAgency.com explore what brand new social network Pheed is all about.

We've been watching Pheed grow since the start of the month, so we've been exploring its growing popularity, what exactly Pheed is and it's available services.
Pheed has had a lot of hype over the last week with over a million people signing up over a couple of days, this is partially due to coverage over a range of online tech sites. From its launch on 1st October, they've been using celebrities to promote the site. It mostly came out of nowhere and used the celeb power to gain signups quickly from promotion across twitter. Due to this it also had 350,000 unique visitors in the first few days.

So, What is Pheed? It's always easier to liken a new social network to an existing one and Pheed is similar to Twitter in that you have a stream where you see the people you've chosen to subscribe to's posts. These can be audio, text, photo, video, broadcast or everything, and they can be filtered to your media preference.

They have an interesting subscription model where users can be paid money for their content. So if you were Miley Cyrus and you could charge your fans $3.99 to see your content on Pheed. The expectation is that the content is high quality, for instance if you wanted to apply a subscription charge for a one off broadcast event like a concert you can. 

Pheed is currently attractive for super fans, they are the ones willing to pay for exclusive and high quality content from their favourite celebrities. Pheed could also work well not just for celebrities but for brands as well; Arsenal have already started an account and are updating it regularly with club news. 

A couple of features worth mentioning are that you can send updates to your Facebook and Twitter account from Pheed, bringing it into competition with social media dashboards such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. You can also use hashtags as a means for searching and seeing grouped together messages. Another feature is the option for "Pheedback", you can say you love something but also that you don't love it, the ability to show you don't like something has long been refused by Facebook.