Gone are the days when a company’s social media strategy could begin and end with giving the Twitter password to the intern.
Today, the $33.8 billion global social media market requires serious strategy, especially from online publishers. And there are many ways to trip up.
Take a media company like The BBC. With 500 social media properties and more than 20,000 employees worldwide, it was extremely difficult to manage who could log on and share content. As a result, three of its Twitter accounts were breached by pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army hackers in 2013.
New York Magazine had the opposite problem. Its team was too small to manage the 24/7 social media presence the outlet needed.
In both cases, the companies turned to social media distribution platform SocialFlow, a provider of enterprise software that analyzes big data sets to help publishers optimize their content’s reach, find corporate partnerships for sponsored posts and manage social media workflow.
The BBC integrated SocialFlow’s sign-on feature with its own identity management system to easily grant and monitor social media access. New York Magazine used the platform’s scheduling and optimization tool to populate its feeds even when employees are off the clock.
According to SocialFlow, half of the world’s top 150 media companies use its platform, including CNN, Condé Nast, Meredith and The Associated Press. It closed a $3.5 million funding round this week to retire debt and further expand its product.
“We just want to be in a position to continue to innovate from a product perspective, and that can be keeping up with new API changes, or dealing with things like Instagram stories, which is a big one that publishers are trying to understand,” CEO Jim Anderson told Built In. “It becomes really important to not just ask, ‘How do I get my content out on those platforms?’ but, ‘How do I monetize those platforms?’ Because as we all know, those big tech companies are making massive revenue and profits, and media companies are lagging behind.”
Before joining SocialFlow in 2013, Anderson served as COO of social marketing platform Vitrue, which was acquired by Oracle for $300 million in 2012.
Investors in SocialFlow’s latest funding round were not disclosed. SocialFlow is profitable, according to company statements, and currently employs 25, mostly in New York City.
