Social platform Spredfast lands $24M to better follow what you’re posting

Your posts and tweets are gold nuggets to brands.

Today, one of the leading platforms for mining those conversations and managing responses, Spredfast, announced it has scored $24 million in new investment.

The company reports more than 600 customers, including the five major broadcast networks. To get a sense of how the Spredfast platform can be used by those customers, take the example of this year’s Super Bowl.

“The NFL was looking to accomplish two goals,” Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron told me via email. The first was “creating a process to consume the massive conversation taking place around the big game,” so that some of the posts and tweets would be shown on air and in the stadium during the game.

The second goal, he said, was to “efficiently monitor and respond to the flood of questions from fans on the ground in Arizona.” Students from Arizona State University’s Cronkite School, Favaron said, replied to posts with “NFL-approved answers around logistics, hospitality, tickets, and other relevant questions,” using Spredfast’s Conversations tool.

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The new funding, from Silver Lake Waterman, will be employed to develop “smart technology with top talent,” he said. It will also be used to help grow the company’s international presence “even more aggressively.”

Social media listening and management is a very competitive space, with participants ranging from big players like Salesforce’s Social Studio and Hootsuite to smaller analytics firms like Liftmetrix.

Favaron told us that Spredfast has “more breadth in product capabilities than our niche competitors, offering social anywhere — any content, any screen, anytime.”

He added, “We’re also able to innovate much more quickly than the larger clouds, [which is] key in this market that changes monthly, weekly, even daily.”

Last spring, social marketing platform Mass Relevance merged with Spredfast, with the combined entity operating under the latter’s name.