Shoutlet eases the pain of social media marketing, raises $15M

Enterprise social marking platform Shoutlet is raising some more cash. Funded by FTV Capital, Shoutlet has raised $15 million in a third round of funding, more than doubling its previous combined funding of $9 million.

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Shoutlet’s platform gives companies a full-scale, centralized way to create, monitor and manage their social marketing campaigns on services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. With its latest bit of funding, Shoutlet CEO Jason Weaver says the company will not only be able to expand its staff to offices in New York and San Francisco, but also accelerate product development.

“We want to say ahead of what’s coming next, and we have some pretty good ideas for upcoming products that will allow us to double down on innovation,” Weaver told VentureBeat.

One of Shoutlet’s most innovative products is Social Switchboard, a so-called trigger-social campaign tool. Using Social Switchboard, marketers can automate content so that it gets published once certain conditions are met — automatically thanking fans when certain Facebook milestones are hit, for instance.

The feature is a big deal because it takes something that marketers formerly had to do manually and automates it, saving time and simplifying the whole process.

According to Weaver, simplicity is the core of Shoutlet’s appeal.

“We felt that social media marketing management was getting too complicated, and we wanted to bring things in-house. We try to make the platform Apple easy,” he said.

The platform’s robustness and simplicity have allowed Shoutlet to attract clients as large and diverse as Nokia, Nascar, Canon, and Sandals Resorts. Shoutlet counts among its ranks over 400 customers, who in turn manage over six thousand accounts across the world.

The social marketing space has been a busy one in recent weeks, with both Oracle and Salesforce making some big moves. Earlier this week, Salesforce picked up social media marketer Buddy Media, and Oracle nabbed social marketing platform Virtue in May, and, more recently, bought social intelligence solutions provider Collective Intellect.

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These moves, Weaver says, only serve to underscore the need for services like Shoutlet. “I see the increased interest in the space as more validation of platforms like ours,” he said.