Hot on the heels of its $26 million Series C funding, Prague-based social media analytics company Socialbakers has made an acquisition designed to bolster its Facebook offering. It’s picked up Chicago, U.S.-based EdgeRank Checker, a provider of social analytics for Facebook’s News Feed.
The acquisition gives an immediate boost to Socialbakers’ customer base — EdgeRank Checker’s 700-strong client portfolio includes Fortune 500 companies and “major entertainment brands” — growing it by nearly a third, according to the company.
EdgeRank Checker provides social marketers with insights into Facebook’s News Feed, enabling brands to monitor news feed engagement by measuring how their content performs over time, and by industry and location. Facebook’s “EdgeRank” is the name for its algorithm that determines what content surfaces in each user’s News Feed.
Interestingly, EdgeRank Checker was one of the first companies to take advantage of Facebook’s real-time insights API when it was quietly released in early 2012. This enabled the bootstrapped startup to build a dashboard for monitoring Facebook News Feed data so clients could “publish the best possible content on their Facebook Page, and earn the biggest return on their social media investment,” as our very own Josh Constine wrote at the time.
Post-acquisition, Socialbakers says EdgeRank Checker will continue to be offered as a self-serve product, and will be provided as a module in a future release of Socialbakers Analytics.
The acquisition price remains undisclosed. However, I’m told EdgeRank Checker’s employees will be joining Socialbakers, giving it a further development presence in the U.S., as well as absorbing its entire client portfolio.