Social media has become a great resource for brands and advertisers over the last few years, giving them the ability to gain insights into the habits of their customers like never before. There is a lot of money to be made simply by seeing what people are doing in real-time.
Social media benchmarking company Unmetric tracks brands across social media to show how their advertising campaigns are tracking. And the company has now raised $5.5 million in Series B financing, it was announced on Thursday.
The round of financing was led by new investor JAFCO Asia, and included participation from existing investor Nexus Venture Partners. The company previously raised a $3.2 million Series A round from Nexus Venture Partners in May of 2012. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to $8.7 million.
The money will be used to scale its platform and to increase the number of social media channels that it supports.
Founded in 2011, the New York City-based Unmetric tracks more than 10,000 brands on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and LinkedIn, giving brands insights and analytics on their social campaigns.
For example, it will track which videos are going viral in real time. One of its customers is Progressive Insurance, whose mascot, Flo, helped gain the company millions of YouTube clicks. Unmetric says that it knows the potential for brand videos “based on average engagement rates. Breakout videos are flagged as viral to help brands quickly identify new competitor campaigns.”
It will also track hashtag use across Twitter. Another client, Nivea, runs Twitter campaigns anchored on topics, including #Kisses, #lips and #hubbies. By tracking hashtags separately by usage, impact and popularity, and distinguishing a tweet from a retweet from a reply, Unmetric was able to determine that the company’s follower base grew three times faster than other personal care brands.
Other brands that use Unmetric include Subway, Toyota, Cisco, and Lowe’s Home Improvement. It is also used by agencies like GroupM, MRY, Golin Harris, and the Zocalo Group.
In addition to the funding news, Unmetric also announced some additions to its board of advisors, which now includes Greg Stuart, the CEO of Mobile Marketing Association; Joseph Jaffe, founder and partner at Evol8tion; Stephanie Agresta, Global Director of Digital at MSLGROUP; Baratunde Thurston, CEO and founder of Cultivated Wit; and Brian Condon, EVP at Comme.
The social analytics space
Other players in the social analytics space have also recently raised money.
In November of last year, social analytics company SocialBakers secured $6 million in a Series B round of funding, bringing its total to over $8 million.
In January of this year, social media advertising and analytics platform Optimal raised $7 million in Series B funding as well.
Of course, the biggest player in this space is Salesforce, which enters social analytics when it bought Canadian social media monitoring platform Radian6 for $326 million in March of 2011. 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: Unmetric.com)
