Social Touch raises $10M to help P&G, Coca-Cola, other brands reach Chinese consumers online

Last year, Salesforce acquired Buddy Media for $689 million to become a marketing powerhouse.

Social Touch hopes to emulate Buddy Media’s success in China — and just snagged more than $10 million to help brands like Proctor & Gamble, Dell, and Coca-Cola get their message out on China’s social networks.

Founded in 2011, Social Touch offers a social media suite that enables enterprises to launch and manage their marketing efforts across Chinese social networks like Sina Weibo, Wechat, and Renren.

“Think of Social Touch as the Buddy Media of China with a huge potential to impact the growing Chinese market,” said a Social Touch representative.

The company has around 100 large enterprise customers — including Proctor & Gamble, Dell, and Coca-Cola — and recently launched a management suite called “PinQu” targeted at small to medium-sized enterprises. That service has already racked up “thousands” of paying customers.

China has plenty of traditional ad agencies, but Social Touch is the only sizable software-as-a-service offering in the country that provides customers with monitoring and analytics capabilities.

In short, “Social Touch is by far the largest social media marketing software platform [in China],” said Ben Yu, managing director of Sierra Ventures.

Silicon Valley-based Sierra Ventures led this latest funding round in Social Touch. Legend Capital and GCV Capital also participated. Social Touch will use the funds for product development and customer acquisition, according to Yu.

Social Touch has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.