Austin-based Spredfast, an enterprise-class social media management system, has received USD1.6m in series A funding from Austin Ventures.
This initial round of funding will help accelerate Spredfast’s business development and increase brand awareness in the social media management market.
“After garnering quite a bit of buzz in 2010, culminating at SXSW, we are excited to partner with Spredfast and assist in further accelerating their business,” says Mike Dodd, venture partner at Austin Ventures. “We believe social media is the next big channel for online marketers to acquire customers, following in the footsteps of display, search, and SEO. This new channel needs a tools platform to manage marketers’ campaigns and measure ROI – Spredfast is this solution.”
Spredfast supports companies at both the enterprise and SMB level, allowing anyone to manage their social media campaigns and customer acquisition initiatives through one dashboard, across multiple platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr.
It also currently supports WordPress, Blogger, MoveableType, Lotus Live Connections, Drupal and most XML-RPC enabled blogging platforms.
Through Spredfast’s integration with Omniture and Google Analytics, Spredfast can now also tie social media analytics with web analytics to secure “click to conversion” metrics. Additionally, users can automate their social media processes and allow multiple users to collaborate at once with its content management and workflow features.
"We’ve been working to establish Spredfast as the ‘Omniture for social media’, a valuable tool for anyone trying to effectively manage and measure a social media initiative," says Kenneth Cho (pictured), Spredfast’s chief executive. "Our relationship with Austin Ventures, specifically with AV partner Mike Dodd previously of Omniture, is great validation of the huge gap Spredfast is filling in the social media market and the reception so many customers are having toward the product. This funding gives us the opportunity to further push this message and reach even more users."
Since its public launch in January, Spredfast has increased its customer base to include companies such as Toms Shoes, Doner and Oracle. These brands join existing early customer adopters like AOL, HP and IBM.
