Epoxy.tv is providing YouTubers with tools to help connect to their audience — and stick with them. Every YouTuber with millions of fans started with just a few, and how you scale up the audience is not a cut and dried. It’s an art as well as a science, but one thing is certain — the most successful creators are the ones who connect strongly to the audience, and can keep that connection going. That’s a daunting challenge as the number of fans grows, and the number of messages from multiple social channels becomes enormous. How does a creator cope?

Epoxy.tv’s mission is to provide tools to help creators deal with this array of social media, and to help them move beyond YouTube and into places like Vine, Instagram and Facebook. More than that, Epoxy.tv can help creators find superfans who influence other fans, and help in more ways to help grow the fan base. Epoxy’s CEO and co-founder, Juan Bruce, spoke with [a]listdaily about Epoxy and previewed some of the topics he’ll discuss at the [a]list Video Summit coming up in August.

Juan Bruce

What is Epoxy, and who is it meant for?

Video creators and new media networks use Epoxy’s software to operate across YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine and more. Epoxy enables asset creation, publishing, audience engagement and community building on the largest social destinations and video platforms. Epoxy also provides multi-platform data that enables networks to guide their creators, formulate content strategy and structure brand partnerships.

How do Epoxy’s tools help content creators deal with the ever-growing array of social media?

Epoxy’s tools enable the creation of unique social and video assets for each social network. When top creators upload a video they are making an additional five-10 assets to share with fans across platforms. Sometimes a GIF or a Vine will trend faster than the YouTube video it came from. In addition to helping streamline the sharing process, Epoxy provides tools for strategically engaging and building your community across platforms, most importantly offers one unified place to operate across these platforms from.

Can Epoxy help the creators who are just starting out as well as those content creators who have huge audiences? Perhaps most important for beginning creators, can Epoxy help them create that huge audience?

Epoxy is designed to help everyone from the YouTube newbie to the industry-leading giants. For creators with large fanbases, Epoxy provides them the focus they need to prioritize and respond to their most important activity on each social networks. We also bring the most meaningful conversations and comments to light, including the posts that don’t include the creators handle, or a predetermined hashtag. For established creators, keeping up with their communities can be a full time job, and any time that we can help save them is more time they have to keep making great content and growing their businesses.

When first starting out as a content creator, it is essential to reach the largest audience possible. This can prove to be quite daunting, especially when working across several different social media platforms. Epoxy’s tools highlight strategies and best practices for operating and growing communities across these platforms. Our goal is to help meet you where you are, and provide the support you need to make it to the next level.

What’s the biggest challenge facing content creators right now, and the biggest opportunity?

Personally, I think they are one in the same. We are smack dab in the middle of this social media content explosion, and everyday more and more people come on board and try to leave their mark on the revolution. The space is growing exponentially, which makes it easy to get lost in the shuffle, but it also creates a huge opportunity for the creative content makers, thinking outside the box, and going down roads that were previously untraveled.

How do you see brands engaging with content creators over the next year?

Plenty of brands have identified the fact that social media is important to the growth of fan-bases through consistent, thoughtful engagement across platforms. One of the problems to date has been effectively setting brands’ expectations on what the measurable ROI of social media campaigns deliver. As the industry adopts standard video distribution and measurement tools, as they have with Epoxy, it becomes easier for brands to dive in headfirst and experiment with creator-driven branded content video campaigns.

Now, albeit the distribution and measurement of video has vastly improved, there’s still the question of who owns the “final creative cut.” You can have great tools to measure online video branded content, but what you really need are brands who trust creators and give them the freedom to create content in the free-flowing artistic fashion that got them the reputation and loyal fan-bases they have today.

Forward thinking brands will give up more creative freedom to creators than they typically would when spending their marketing budgets on more traditional advertising channels.