Social and digital media analytics company Socialbakers has just secured US$2m in venture capital finance in a round led by European venture capital firm Earlybird Venture Capital.
The funding will enable already profitable Socialbakers to execute on aggressive growth plans and extend its platform offering.
Since the launch of Socialbakers.com in 2009, more than 250,000 brands and marketing professionals already engage with the Socialbakers platform each month and in 2011 more than 30 of the Fortune 500 chose to license the premium version of the service, including Lufthansa, L’Oréal, Danone, Vodafone, Samsung, GE Money, Ogilvy, Kraft and Peugeot.
“Socialbakers has experienced providential growth in the last year, reached profitability every quarter since our launch, hired 55 professionals and we are still growing strongly,” said Jan Rezab, CEO and co-founder, Socialbakers.
“The funding from Earlybird enables us to accelerate the business growth of our software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based social media platform and further strengthens our position in the most important global markets,” Rezab added.
Flexible dashboard for social media campaigns
The company’s flexible dashboard Socialbakers Engagement Analytics enables complex statistical analysis of Facebook in all countries globally, Facebook pages, and places, Facebook applications, developers on the Facebook platform, as well as Facebook advertising prices, with results appearing in real time.
“Facebook today is one of the most important forms of consumer engagement, source of traffic, and one of the most significant bases for tangible customer conversion for brands,” said Irene Meister, Global Digital and Social Media manager at Danone.
“To date, this key channel has been difficult to manage in terms of content management, user analytics, and engagement. Socialbakers changes this and allows global brands like Danone to holistically measure and manage their Facebook presence so we can better connect with consumers on a local and global level.”
Socialbakers Engagement Builder includes benchmarking, competitive reporting, streamlined reporting and integrated workflow capabilities to give users the ability to track and measure dozens of social media metrics. Additionally, Socialbakers also measures LinkedIn statistics globally, Twitter user accounts, and Google+ accounts.
“Social and digital media analytics is one of the most exciting and fastest areas of growth in web-based software-as-a-service models today,” said Jason Whitmire, general partner at Earlybird.
“The social media industry has reached an inflection point where there is a need for a highly scalable model combining social media and SaaS. We believe this investment will support Socialbakers to continue to deliver scale, performance, quality and reliability to even the largest enterprise players,” Whitmire said.
