Mass Relevance merges with Spredfast to form one giant social marketing platform

Two of the largest startups powering social marketing platforms — Mass Relevance and Spredfast — announced a merger today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Mass Relevance is a company that provides advertisers and big brands with an easy way to manage the flow of social content (updates and activity from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Bazaarvoice, YouTube, Foursquare, and others) from fans/consumers, and then actually use that content to enhance your marketing strategy.

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One highly visible example of this would be President Barack Obama’s Twitter Town Hall event, which used Mass Relevance to field questions and display tweets on-screen. Mass Relevance’s service has proved popular among advertisers that wish to show case social content (like tweets) within commercials or TV shows that want to interact with fans in real-time during a broadcast, as VentureBeat previously reported.

Spredfast, by contrast, is focused on providing tools that allow big companies or brands to manage all that social activity, including being able involve a large portion of a company’s workforce when doing social marketing and promotion.

The new entity will operate under the Spredfast brand and be able to provide clients with a much more comprehensive social marketing platform, the companies claim. Together the Austin, Tex.-based companies have over 600 customers (including all five major U.S. TV networks) and drive more than 15 billion monthly impressions to social content across 84 different countries.

“By teaming up, we’ll give marketers access to every piece of social data submitted in real-time, so they can uncover conversations that matter to their brand and build shared experiences that allow them to interact with their audience, both one-to-one and one-to-many,” said Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron in a blog post about the merger.

“We built Mass Relevance to connect relevant conversations from social networks and fuse them into a customer’s brand story. Three years later, we are honored to align with our neighbors, another Austin-based company, to complete the circle of bringing audience participation into every aspect of marketing,” said Mass Relevance founder and CEO Sam Decker in a statement.

Favaron will continue as Spredfast’s leader, while Mass Relevance founder Sam Decker will serve as executive adviser to the company and join its board of directors.

Founded in 2008, Spredfast has previously raised a total of $64.1 million in funding to date, while Mass Relevance raised $5.5 million in total funding. The merged company will have over 350 employees operating out of Austin, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London, and Sydney.