Engagor, a Belgian startup that offers tools for large brands to manage their presence on social media, is announcing that it has raised $2.6 million in Series A funding led by Hummingbird Ventures.
It’s a pretty crowded market, and it has been for a while — when we wrote about Engagor two years ago, the headline was, “Yet Another Social Media Management Tool, Or A Better One?.” However, co-founder and CEO Folke Lemaitre said most existing products are specific solutions that focus on, say, say social listening or social publishing, rather than covering the full gamut of a social media team’s needs.
Lemaitre gave me a demo of the product last week. It covers features from monitoring to collaboration to publishing — so you can find the important conversations, participate in them, and then track your success. Lemaitre particularly emphasized the inbox, which he said is “really the place where the social media team is doing their day-to-day work,” going through a list of social media mentions and either responding, noting that they don’t need a response, or assigning them to different team members. (You can set up a number of different filters to determine what shows up in the inbox and how it’s prioritized.)
Speaking of team members, Engagor is also releasing a new team performance tracking feature today — as the name suggests, it allows customers to see how each member of the team is doing. So if, for example, one team member seems to be doing more harm than good with their responses, the rest of the team should be able to see that and to act accordingly.
Even though Engagor bills itself as a “one-stop shop” for social media management, one thing it doesn’t offer is functionality for managing social media ad campaigns. Lemaitre said that’s because it’s meant for the social media team, not the customer service team or the marketing team. At the same time, it’s meant to facilitate collaboration between those groups, for example by integrating with services like Salesforce and Zendesk. Continuing with the inbox analogy, Lemaitre compared it to Gmail: “You’re not going to use Gmail for doing those big email campaigns, you’re going to use MailChimp. We’re the Gmail for day-to-day social media management.”
Existing customers include PepsiCo, Volvo, McDonald’s and IKEA.
One of the company’s next big priorities is growing in the United States. It’s open a San Francisco office led by vice president of US sales Steven Reading, and it sounds like Lemaitre himself may be moving out soon.