Startup Buddy Media, a company that provides social media management tools to brands, has raised $2 million in funding from previous investors including SoftBank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Ron Conway, and Bay Partners. Buddy Media previously raised $8 million in funding.
Buddy Media offers brand marketers and agencies and all-in-one social media management system to help create, manage and track social campaigns on Facebook and Twitter (the client will also offers functionality for MySpace and other social networks). With regard to Facebook, the platform lets agencies create, manage and track Facebook Fan pages to drive and increase user and brand engagement. Users don’t need to have any prior FBML knowledge to create pages on Facebook and can create sleek and interactive pages fairly easily. Buddy Media’s Twitter Management System, which we wrote about here, lets marketers measure and identify Twitter trending topics around a particular brand, related topics and competitors. You can also track performance and trends for a brand and entire industry across Twitter with easy to view data on followers, mentions, and re-Tweets.
As brands are flocking to Facebook to connect with the social network’s 400 million plus users, Buddy Media’s offerings come in handy. In fact, the startup is was profitable at the end of 2009, and is on track to make $20 million in sales this year. And well-known brands and organizations are using Buddy Media’s platform including Budweiser, NBC’s iVillage, designer Tory Burch, the NHL and the Dallas Cowboys. The platform finished 2009 with 150 clients, and has already added 45 more in 2010 alone. Buddy Media’s CEO and founder Michael Lazerow tells me that the startup is adding around 20 clients per month. And Lazerow says that the company needs more staff and talent to manage this rapid influx of clients. The new funding will be primarily used to hire developers and sales professionals.
Buddy Media’s platform is attractive because it lets marketers and advertisers with little to no technical knowledge create and manage attractive, branded Facebook fan pages, Twitter profiles and more. Of course, Buddy Media has a few competitors in the field including Involver and CoTweet (which was just acquired by ExactTarget ).
