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  • Vitrue Is Minting Money By Taming Millions Of Fans For Big Brands

    Mg Siegler

    MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

    Friday, October 15th, 2010

    What do Harley Davidson, Mentos, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Crocs, Eddie Bauer, Maybelline, Denver Broncos, University of Texas Athletic Department, and Purina all have in common? They’re brands that have signed up with Vitrue, a social media marketing company — just in the last quarter. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was their best quarter ever in terms of revenue and expansion.

    It’s been a while since we’ve written about the company — in fact, as far as I can tell, it has been about four years. Back then, Vitrue was just getting started, taking seed funding from Ron Conway and others. Since then, they’ve raised several million more dollars, but have also developed an SRM (social relationship management) platform that is used by some of the largest companies in the world.

    Four years ago, Facebook wasn’t anything close to what it is today, and Twitter didn’t exist. Now, of course, Vitrue’s business is heavily wrapped around social networks such as those. The blog Inside Facebook did a good Q&A recently with CEO Reggie Bradford on how specifically his company utilizes Facebook.

    From Q2 to Q3 this year, Vitrue says revenue grew nearly 100 percent as they tripled accounts using their SRM platform while also greatly expanding access their their API. To manage the growth, the company has also doubled their workforce in 2010, we’re told. But even after that, they remain cash-flow positive.

    Currently, the service says it managed over 680 Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts for various clients. That adds up to some 276 million fans/followers (a nearly 250 percent jump in growth from Q2). They also moderate some 5 million comments for clients. Ugh — that would be my least favorite job ever.

    Seeing as the company seems to be rocking and rolling, it probably won’t be another four years before we update on them again. Just a guess.

    Company: Vitrue
    Website: vitrue.com
    Launch Date: May 1, 2006
    Funding: $33M

    Vitrue offers the industry’s most scalable and secure cloud-based social marketing solution, enabling brands to harness the full marketing potential of social on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and emerging platforms. The award-winning Vitrue SRM platform collectively manages more than one billion social relationships in over 100 countries across more than 4,500 social accounts for its clients. For more information, visit http://www.vitrue.com.

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