Brands love marketing across social media, but it is a little like TV advertising in that it is hard to measure how effective it is. Sure, you can count retweets, likes, and Klout scores, but how does that translate into real engagement with a brand or actual spending? SocialFlow is trying to answer these questions, and in the process is growing like crazy.
“I don’t know who put the call out to put money into social media, but it is out there,” says CEO Frank Speiser. A year ago, Socialflow had two employees. Today, it has 34. “We have 5,500 leads active and qualified,” says Speiser. “I just need people to work the phones.”
SocialFlow already supports 2,000 paying accounts, everything from brands to media sites to ecommerce. They use SocialFlow as a dashboard to manage what messages they Tweet or put on their Facebook page and when those messages go out. The betaworks company raised $7 million last summer.
SocialFlow’s algorithms try to figure out when a company’s social audience will be most receptive to a particular message based on the content of that message, and then it automatically Tweets it out or creates a status update on the company’s Facebook page. SocialFlow then ties these messages back into business goals by measuring the conversion rate of each message, such as clicks to a website as measured by Google Analytics.
“We think it is the first product that optimizes for conversion through the funnel,” says Speiser. “It completes the loop. The reason you want a million followers is because you want 10,000 people to do something for you.”
After about a year adding accounts through a limited beta, SocialFlow is launching today to anyone who wants to try it out on a self-serve basis with pricing at $99/month for each account. It supports Twitter, Facebook, Google Analytics, and Omniture. One new feature is an Attention Score between 0 and 100 which attempts to measure how receptive your audience is at any given time to a particular message. The opportunity to engage audiences through social media can be fleeting. SocialFlow helps brands optimize their messages in realtime.
