Social analytics company SocialBakers takes in $6M

SocialBakers helps major brands make sense of social media

As social media continues to grow, social analytics is becoming even more important, as the world’s biggest brands struggle to cut through the chatter and get the most out of their fans on social media.

Social analytics company SocialBakers has secured $6 million in a Series B round of funding, it was announced Monday.

The round was led by Index Ventures, with additional funding from existing investor Earlybird Venture Capital, who previously put $2 million into the company in September 2011. SocialBakers has now raised over $8 million total.

The money will be used to expand the company’s global reach, and to further customize its product.

“With this funding, we will continue building our platform’s social measurement features to help companies target their audiences more efficiently, while allowing them to react quickly to the ever-changing social media environment and providing dedicated global care to address their individual needs,” Socialbakers CEO Jan Rezab said in a statement.

Socialbakers current products include Socially Devoted, a service that measures the quality of customer service in social media channels.

Socialbaker created Socially Devoted in order to help companies that have created official social networks to work with and for its customers, and works with them to improve customer relations.

For example, in October, SocialBakers released a study showing how many fan questions are answered by brands on Facebook and found that less than half of customer questions are being answered. Another study, released right before the presidential election, measuring the engagement of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama on Facebook.

SocialBakers takes this information, and uses it to assist its clients with maximizing their potential on social networks.

SocialBakers, which was founded in 2009, is used by more than a fifth of all Fortune 500 companies, including McDonald’s, Nestle, Henkel, LVMH and Vodafone.

More than 450,000 marketing executives use Socialbakers comparative analytics platform every month, in order to measure social media performance across all major networks including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+. SocialBakers helps to optimize their clients’ social marketing strategy. Socialbakers currently monitors 10 million social media corporate profiles.

The SocialBakers team has expanded over the last two years, in its Prague, Munich, London, Paris and San Francisco offices. The company has also opened bases in Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Dubai and Istanbul.

“There is no question that Socialbakers leads this space. Their name is now synonymous with intelligent social media measurement and benchmarking,” Index Ventures Partner Jan Hammer said in a statement.  “With a management team as deeply committed to becoming the authority in social media measurement, it is both a pleasure and exhilarating to be part of their astonishing business.”

The social analytics space

As social networks like Facebook, which recently announced that it had passed the one billion user mark, have continued to expand their influence, the space for social media analytics has been pretty hot the last year or two, with some pretty big names being snatched up.

In March of 2011, Salesforce bought Canadian social media monitoring platform Radian6 for $326 million. The company then purchased Buddy Media, a company that creates social media analytics for brands, for $689 million in June of 2012.

Buddy Media helps maintain advertising, ads and pages on social networks. While it is best known for its work with ad-targeting for Facebook, Buddy Media also utilizes Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

(Image source: https://www.freshnetworks.com)