Back in October, GroSocial raised $450K in seed funding from the Kickstart Seed Fund, Monarch Ventures, Rock & Hammer Ventures and a handful of angel investors. The seed funding acted as early validation and fuel for the Utah-based startup, which is on a mission to help SMBs — and organizations that lack the resources to train or hire dedicated social media teams — boost customer engagement and monetization via social media.

Today, the Utah-based social media marketing company has officially received further validation from investors, with the announcement that it has closed an additional $1 million in funding. Each of the investors that participated in the startup’s initial financing have re-upped, along with a handful of newcomers, including HubSpot Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah and HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe.

Thus far, GroSocial has focused its efforts primarily on Facebook, but with the new capital, Co-founder and CEO Zach Mangum tells us that the startup will be expanding its scope to include integrations with other social networks in an effort to become the “Buddy Media for SMBs.”

Since October, GroSocial’s partner list has grown to include Yellow Pages, LegalZoom, SurveyMonkey, and HubSpot, among others, adding to the thousands of businesses (across some 20+ countries) already using its products. The startup is also in the process of working with a number of SMB aggregators to white label its platform and sell it as their own social media marketing product.

For some context, GroSocial has been primarily focused on its flagship “Customizer” platform, which allows brand managers to launch custom-designed promotional tabs on their Facebook partner networks. Partners can use those tabs to run contests, offer promotions, coupons, services, or to add videos. Managers can choose to add a “like gate,” meaning that customers must “like” the company’s brand page in order to access the promotions that live on the tabs, and have the ability to choose which parts of its tabs can be modified by partners and take advantage of engagement statistics.

And, thanks to integrations with services like SurveyMonkey, users can not only use the drag and drop application to design custom content for Facebook pages, but take advantage of social distribution of surveys, collecting feedback from Facebook fans as they visit your brand pages.

As for what’s next, according to David Cohen of AllFacebook, GroSocial will be looking to expand its offerings to small to mid-sized marketing agencies, enabling access to white-label services — something traditionally reserved for larger agencies with more sizable social marketing budgets. Agencies will be able to resell GroSocial services at a price point that begins at $200 per month, making it easy to turn a profit and recoup costs.

This new functionality will allow GroSocial to become both a content and training provider for the many small-to-midsize marketing agencies out there, allowing the startup to monetize as it scales, while reducing the headache agencies find when trying to juggle the implementation of their clients’ social media marketing initiatives while managing their accounts.

Though GroSocial has been targeting SMBs, using Facebook as the foundation for its apps, with its new funding in tow, the startup will be looking to expand to other social networks as well as court larger companies, building on the recent additions of eBay and SkullCandy to its client roster. Mangum said that he expects GroSocial to pass 50,000 paying customers by the end of the year, which, along with the funding, will enable the startup to double its headcount.

For more, find GroSocial at home here, or check out a few of the apps that were created by some of its SMB users. Video on Customizer below:

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

Smart B2B companies have long known that winning big is predicated on redefining the rules of competition to your advantage over incumbent vendors. A more difficult question is whether you want to own a meme. In other words, do you want to define a new categorical term. Microsoft did that to great effect when they created the office suite category. More recently, Salesforce.com did something similar, becoming the de facto player one thinks of when they think of cloud computing in the process. It’s a very high-risk, high-return strategy.

For my money, the best recent example of this approach is HubSpot. HubSpot that has created and “owned” the Inbound Marketing meme and category. Having recently started discussions with investors, there is a paradox that I’ve discovered: On the one hand, investors like startups that shoot for big opportunities. On the other hand, they get sweaty palms when you describe how you are going to own a new category. Most of them would rather have you go after a known category. I thought it would be interesting to hear how Hubspot went through this decision process.

Hubspot’s Biggest Internal Debate
It wasn’t clear cut at the beginning, yet Hubspot’s choice to own a new category now has their competition playing by Hubspot’s rules. In fact, their competition is essentially funding Hubspot’s marketing — many of their competitors define themselves as “Inbound Marketing” companies. Yet Google “Inbound Marketing” and you’ll see how Hubspot dominates the results.

In the early days, the choice wasn’t obvious for Hubspot. There was known market demand for search terms like Internet marketing optimization, SEO, etc. As Hubspot’s CEO, Brian Halligan, said “we decided if we wanted to own something big, we’d need to create our own solar system rather than live in someone else’s.” At that point, they spent roughly 60 percent of their time building the concept of Inbound marketing and 40 percent on marketing Hubspot itself. Today, the mix has flipped as their competitors are picking up the tab for category marketing.

Hubspot Becomes a Content Production Machine
Halligan describes Hubspot as virtually a TV production operation given the volume of content they produce. The advantage from the outset that Hubspot maintains today is that they are gated more by the width of their brain than the fatness of their wallet. As long as they can continue to come up with new insights and ideas on how to be a more effective inbound marketer, they are able to inexpensively produce content in a model that scales very efficiently. Hubspot’s array of inbound marketing drives 95 percent of their 50,000 monthly leads/inquiries. The following list is the stack rank of the highest ROI inbound marketing tactics they employ (see links below to their most popular webinars, e-books and blog posts):

1. Grader applications: Free tools such as the Marketing Grader that assess a business’ marketing via code
2. Corporate blog: Filled with an ever-expanding mix of evergreen content
3. Webinars: Thought leadership webinars sharing data and insights
4. Opt-in email list (mainly built via Grader applications)
5. Annual conference: Roughly 1,000 people attend their annual in-person event
6. Twitter: Across their various Twitter feeds, they have a few hundred thousand people following them while their nearest competitor has less than 10 percent of followers
7. LinkedIn: Over 75,000 people in their LinkedIn group
8. Book
9. Facebook: Close to 100,000 people in their Facebook group
10. YouTube: Their videos have been viewed over a million times

Hubspot has demonstrated that if you are long on your opportunity, building your own meme that you can own reaps major dividends. Naturally, one has to be particularly deft at producing interesting content (or apps) that isn’t marketing pabulum. However, if an organization produces valuable content that grows a category that it “owns” the ROI of that content production is likely the highest ROI item that a company can invest in.

Related Links:

Most popular webinars:

• The Science of Social Media
• Social Revolution: Connecting with Today’s Customer
• The Science of Email Marketing

Most popular e-books:

• The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing
• How to Use Facebook for Business
• Learning SEO From The Experts – A Step-By-Step Guide

Most popular blog posts:

• The 15 Best Facebook Pages You’ve Ever Seen
• The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Pinterest for Marketing

Marketing software company HubSpot has brought on a new leader today—Akamai CFO JD Sherman. Sherman has been chief financial officer at Akamai for over 6 years.

Prior to Akamai, Sherman served as the chief financial executive of IBM’s $21 billion Systems and Technology Group. Over the course of 15 years at IBM, Sherman held senior executive positions in Finance, including Vice President, Finance and Planning, zSeries Server Division, and Assistant Controller of IBM Corporate Financial Strategy and Budgets.

He also served as CFO for semiconductor company CommQuest, which was acquired by IBM in March of 1998 for $200 million.

For background, HubSpot’s marketing software customers manage websites and generate leads. HubSpot, which just raised a massive $32 million from Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Salesforce and others, has been on a bit of an acquisition spree and just bought Performable and OneForty.

Sherman’s addition represents more than just a talent win. His experience leading two public companies in the technology space could help HubSpot navigate a future in the public markets. The company says: We have been growing at record pace and want to build a company that can be successful in the public markets.

HubSpot CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan explained: “We always thought HubSpot could be a large, publicly traded company anchoring the software industry in Boston. Hiring a COO with public company experience is the next step on that path…We are on the same fast growth path of all the successful SaaS companies, and need to start preparing for an IPO. I know JD brings the right experience to our management team.”

Performable offers a marketing software platform for businesses looking to optimize their marketing, sales and customer service efforts. The startup gives clients a view into the sales and marketing performance across e-mail, web, social media and mobile tools. Performable provides businesses with analytical tools to understand what marketing and sales efforts are working and can trigger marketing campaigns based on real customer behavior.

Applications in the software platform include marketing analytics, marketing automation, search engine keyword & social media ROI analytics, lead management, cohort analytics, landing pages, social media monitoring and website conversion optimization.

HubSpot says Performable will help its customers turn more visitors into leads and customers and adds considerable talent to the company. For background, HubSpot also helps manage customers websites and generate leads. For example, HubSpot helps businesses build blogs and engage directly with customers via social networks.

The company last raised capital – a $16 million round led by Scale Venture Partners – in late 2009. They’ve raised a total of $33.5 million to date.

That on itself is not so surprising; a Twitter profile associated with the default avatar generally screams ‘newbie’, which is generally an incentive not to follow someone unless you know that person in real life or on other social networks. There’s a good reason why spammers who create fake Twitter accounts tend to include pictures in profiles – it’s human nature to instantly trust personalized online accounts more than generic ones.

But we love stats here at TechCrunch, so here you go:

(Via Mike Volpe, who has a pretty good profile picture)

WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips. A premium version will be offered in about 3 months: for a yet-to-be-determined fee, publishers and marketers will then be able to screen Web sites based on up to 120 pre-defined critera, get served more personalized tips as well as references to online tools that they can use to increase the findability and performance of their Web sites.

Update: site seems to be down or at least terribly slow due to our coverage, so hang in there.

Update 2: seems to be back and more stable now

I gave the tool a spin and generated a report for techcrunch.com – turns out we’re worthy of a WooRank of 82.4. While I have absolutely no idea what that means exactly, according to these statistics we’re well above the average. In the overall ranking, we even made the top 50, ahead of sites like the Apple Store, MySpace, ESPN.com and NYTimes.com (take that, New York Times, we haz bigger WooRankz!).

Apparently, we need to work on our headings, immage attribution tags, meta description and keywords, XML sitemap(s) and other aspects like Web standards compliance. We score pretty well on content (number of indexed pages), off-site SEO (particularly on the social media level) and website usability and load time.

Frankly, that’s a lot of valuable information available free of charge, so I’ll be curious to know in a couple of months how WooRank will try to entice people to pay for more detailed information and improvement tips.

WooRank was built by fellow Belgians, namely digital marketer Jean Derély of BetaGroup and the founders of interactive agency 1MD.be. Since soft-launching the service a couple of days ago, 27,000 reports have already been generated by some 7,500 visitors.

For more online tools, check out Website Grader but also HitTail and LotusJump.

Marketing software startup HubSpot has put together its third ‘State of the Twittersphere’ report, which is based on an analysis of more than 5 million Twitter accounts and 6 million tweets, collected by the company’s free Twitter Grader tool.

The main take-away from the report (PDF): peaking at around 13% in March 2009, growth in new Twitter users has recently slowed down significantly, dropping to a mere 3.5% in October 2009. That’s still growth, but a mind-blowing growth rate it is no longer.

And as we’ve reported before, visits to Twitter.com have declined in number too, dropping 8% in October 2009. Also, Erick yesterday posted a must-read analysis of how the realtime web (and Twitter specifically) can be measured, if you’re interested.

We should also note Twitter CEO Evan Williams recently tweeted that they had their single biggest usage day on Jan 12, and that they were expecting to break that record again the day after. That is well possible, and consistent with HubSpot’s findings:

In the seven months since HubSpot last examined the ‘twittersphere’, the average Twitter user has become less of a newbie, claims the company in the report. The average user is not only following more people, he or she also gets followed by more people and posts more updates.

To sum up:

- Today the average Twitter account has 300 followers; in July 2009, it had 70
- The average account now follows 173 accounts; in July 2009 it was only following 47
- The average account today has posted 420 updates; in July 2009 that number was 119

Also worth noting: HubSpot says the average Twitter account became better implemented during the period from July 2009 to January 2010, as more users have taken the time to complete their profiles, adding bios, locations and web addresses.

HubSpot’s report paints a picture of Twitter slowly but surely increasing its international footprint: locations listed in Twitter profiles (and thus self-reported by users) were much more spread across the globe than before:

- 15% of the top 20 Twitter locations were outside North America in July 2009
- 40% of the top 20 Twitter locations are outside North America in January 2010

Looking at user patterns, HubSpot found that Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of total tweets in the analysis, while 10-11 pm appears to be the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for 4.8% of the tweets in an average day.

Finally, HubSpot claims the vast majority of Twitter users have networks under 100 people: 82% of users have less than 100 followers while 81% are following less than 100 people.

Does the above ring true for you?

(Via HubSpot blog)

According to the blog post announcing the investment, the valuation of the company went up again with this fresh round of funding.

The capital will mostly be used to increase investment in R&D in solutions that fix the ‘broken’ set of outbound marketing tools currently used by many companies, says the startup. HubSpot claims revenue growth of 350% over the last year and adds that its growth in number of customers is consistent as well:

HubSpot offers an Internet marketing application that helps businesses with their SEO strategy and lead generation and conversion efforts. The company is behind tools like Website Grader, which essentially audits websites for their search engine friendliness, and boasts similar tools specifically for Twitter and Facebook.

Hubspot’s Facebook Grader will tell you your “reach and authority” on Facebook. My score is 90/100.

The tool works by analyzing the number of friends you have, how important those friends are (whatever that means), how complete your profile is, how many wall posts you have and how many groups you belong to. It turns out I haven’t filled out much of my profile and there are some other things I’ve neglected to attend to, so I only get an A-.

I can live with that, but there are others out there who seem to take issue with how the site ranks people. French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur is “outraged” that it doesn’t take into account that he has a fan page, for example (I find fan pages obnoxious myself), and gave him a score of only 97.6. C’est la vie.

To sum up my opinion of this tool, it’s beyond useless. Not that I ever planned to, but the last thing I’ll ever do now is fill in more of my profile or join more groups. Maybe I can get that 90 down to 0.

The company has a similar tool for Twitter.

How many followers do most people really have on Twitter? The average number of both followers and other members people on Twitter are following is about 70, according to the State of the Twittersphere, a new report by Web marketing startup HubSpot. (Full report embedded below). But that average is skewed by elite Twitterers who have hundreds or thousands of followers. The vast majority of people on Twitter use it to keep in touch with a much smaller circle of friends and peers. For those with 50 or fewer followers (three quarters of all users), the average number of followers is 15.6 and the average number of people they are following is 18.4.

HubSpot’s State of the Twittersphere report is inspired by Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, which tries to quantify trends across all the blogs it tracks. HubSpot gets its data from Twitter Grader, a site it operates that generates a grade for Twitter users based on factors such as how many followers they have, the reach of the people who are following them, and how often they post updates.

Twitter Grader is basically a vanity search site for Twitter, but it has managed to compile data on over 500,000 Twitter accounts, which is probably around 10 percent of the total. It is not clear how representative these users are, but it is a large sample and they certainly are not all power users. (Three percent had 0 followers, 9 percent didn’t follow anyone else, and 22 percent had five or fewer followers). Until Twitter releases its own State of the Twittersphere report, this is as good as the data gets.

Some other key stats from the report:

—70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
—20% of Twitter users have joined in the past 60 days
—The average user has been on Twitter 275 days

So it is pretty much all newbies, and mainstream adoption is just getting started.

—The most popular days of the week to Tweet are Wednesday and Thursday
—An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts are registered each day.
—Only 5 percent of all Twitter users have more than 250 followers.
—Only 0.8 percent have more than 1,000
—22 percent have five or fewer followers
—Another 24 percent (the largest group) have between 11 and 25 followers

Similarly, most people don’t follow more than 25 other people. In fact, 30 percent follow the Tweets of five or fewer other members. Again, 11 to 25 seems to be a sweet spot, with 21 percent users following that many others. Here’s is the breakdown:

http://viewer.docstoc.com/
State of the Twittersphere – Get more Information Technology

Internet marketing is big money, and so is the $12 million recently raised by HubSpot, a consultancy and software provider for sites looking to improve their visibility online.

The Series B round led by Matrix Partners comes on top of the $5 million raised from General Catalyst Partners last September, bringing the company’s grand total to over $17 million.

In addition to providing paid SEO services, HubSpot offers a free search optimization tool called Website Grader that will automatically assess your website, score it on a 1-100 scale, and show you where to make changes that will get it in front of more eyeballs. The tool claims to have assessed over 300,000 sites, and your score on the 1-100 scale represents the percentage of those sites that your site tops (kind of like the SAT).

TechCrunch scored a 99 out of 100, but we do have some weak areas. Apparently, we use too many images and not enough metadata. Website Grader found 3,918,184 inbound links to TechCrunch, and 17,500 pages indexed on Google, where we have a PageRank of 7 (out of 10). Blogs by their very nature tend to do well on natural search results, because they are constantly updated and have a lot of links going in and out.

Just for fun, I typed in the WSJ.com and the NYTimes.com to get comparison stats. Both also scored a 99. But, as you’d expect, the NYTimes trounces the WSJ.com (and us) when it comes to PageRank, inbound links, and traffic. That is simply a function of being an open site versus a closed, subscription site like the WSJ.com. Here are the comparison stats:

These figures really show the penalty the WSJ.com is taking by sticking to its subscription wall. Instead of a PageRank of 9 like the NYTimes.com, its PageRank is the same as ours. The traffic rank numbers are from Alexa, so I’d ignore them. The number of WSJ.com pages bookmarked on del.icio.us or indexed by Google is a tiny fraction of what it would be if it was a fully open site. Even if these numbers are not completely accurate, you get a sense of how much a better job the Wall Street Journal could be doing to make its articles visible to the outside world.

Website Grader is operated by HubSpot, a search engine and Web-marketing optimization company hoping to get leads from the site. If you use it, don’t be surprised if you get contacted by one of its sales reps trying to upsell you to one of its paid services. Hey, you didn’t really think it was free, did you?