The Last Big Independent Social Marketer Syncapse Pimps Itself For Acquisition With Analytics Suite

Syncapse wants to get bought. All its well funded competitors — Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, Wildfire — already have. So today it releases a new analytics suite, making it a more appealing turn-key social marketing solution to acquirers by rounding out its Faceb00k ads and Pages offering.

The company’s PR keeps pitching it to blogs as “the largest independent social media management player remaining”, seemingly in hopes of securing it and its investors who’ve plopped down $28.3 million in funding a multi-hundred million purchase like its compatriots got.

It’s been a juicy summer, as older enterprise giants like Oracle and Salesforce plus ads businesses like Google who hesitated to build social marketing products or services buy late stage startups in the space. But IBM, Microsoft, and some other huge enterprisers have yet to snap someone up, and they surely don’t want to be shut out of the next era of online marketing.

That leaves a massive opportunity for Syncapse, as well as other companies that help brands promote themselves on Facebook and other social platforms including the smaller Shoutlet, and the long-bootstrapped ThisMoment. And with Facebook’s shaky IPO sending ripples of fear through the industry about going public, aiming to be acquired seems like a smart strategy.

Syncapse has been following in Buddy Media’s footsteps. In February Buddy bought Brighter Option, a lucrative Facebook Ads API service that takes a cut of brand ad spend. That gave it the wide range of uses necessary to prime it for its $689 million acquisition by Salesforce. In June, Syncapse bought an Ads API company of its own, Clickable.

With today’s analytics suite release, Syncapse can help brands better measure and optimize their presences, ads, and virality on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from one dashboard. Clients can compare their results across platforms to assess where money is best spent. The push nets Syncapse a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer badge for analytics.

Syncapse made another appeal to the press a few weeks ago, noting it had grown its client base by more than 200% in the past 12 months, now repping 100 global brands including L’Oreal, Anheuser-Busch InBev, RIM, and Coca-Cola.

If IBM, Microsoft, or someone else are going to buy into social, they’ll want all their bases covered, including publishing, apps, ads, and analytics. Now that Syncapse offers them all, it’s a lot more sensible of a purchase, especially considering the increasing focus on big data analytics as a critical component to business success.

Syncapse could already be in acquisition talks, and this release might boost the price it could command high enough for it to agree to sell. Now we just have to wait to see who pulls the trigger, or whether Syncapse’s grooming will fail and it will have to continue to go it alone on its own merits.