Awe.sm pockets $4M for social media tracking service

Foundry, GRP see the value in charting how social media interactions translate to new sales

As companies devote more time to creating a strong and consistent social media experience for its users, they often looking for companies that can help them track the results of all the hours put into updating and interacting on social networks.

One San Francisco social data tracking company, Awe.sm, announced Thursday that it received a $4 million Series A round of financing led by Foundry Group and GRP Partners.

Awe.sm allows developers to track all the crucial details of sharing activities, and automatically improve their own services to get the most interaction with each campaign or post. The young company has gained more than 500 clients using its technology.

While many companies are able to tell you how many people are clicking, retweeting, 'liking' and posting to your social pages (everyone from Google Anayltics and Xinureturns to PostRank and SocialToo offer some level of charting) but few are able take those interactions and connect them into actual and prospective sales.

“In a world where companies are mindlessly paying money for ‘likes’ or ‘followers’, we welcome the new era in which people will use awe.sm data to start spending their social media budgets on real metrics like customer conversions,” Mark Suster, Partner, GRP Partners, said in a statement. “I believe the end of the hype phase of social media has begun.”

StockTwits, a trading platform, has used Awe.sm to track how its users react to quarterly earnings reports for public companies and see what they may trade the stocks in favor of. With this type of tailored data,

StockTwits can generate more in-depth ways to communicate with its users to help them respond to stock news appropriately.

Awe.sm's service is primarily targeted towards developers that deeply integrate social media into their products and services to reach specific goals.
 
“Social marketing is an enormous opportunity for innovation — it can be useful to nearly every business. But companies need tools focused on driving their specific business goals,” Jonathan Strauss, awe.sm’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “With the awe.sm platform, our customers can offer specialized social marketing solutions to their clients, the way Topspin Media does for music artists, StockTwits does for investment relations professionals, and LocalResponse does for offline businesses.”
 
Currently, the two-year-old platform is subscription-based, with access starting as low as $15 per month for some of its smaller developers.

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