Sprinklr acquires Pluck, continuing the consolidation in social media management

Social media management platform Sprinklr is acquiring community management platform Pluck, extending its customers’ engagement capabilities beyond third party social networks to their websites.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sprinklr has over 600 employees and has raised $77.5M thus far, including $40M in it’s D round last April. Pluck raised $17M before being acquired by Demand Media in 2008. This marks Sprinklr’s fourth acquisition, after Dachis Group, TBG Digital, and Branderati.

At a time when the number of marketing technologies grows at an unprecedented pace, Sprinklr is aiming to provide an increasingly integrated social platform so brands don’t have to deal with disparate point solutions and data sets.

The social media management market had just 31 immature vendors in 2011. Since then the market has grown, then contracted, and now matured.

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Sprinklr’s latest acquisition reflects maturity in the social media management market, but also raises the question of how far individual social platforms can go. Social media was once treated as an experimental island by marketing departments, but for most brands today it’s an important part of a broader, multi-channel engagement strategy.

The marketing cloud vendors each have social components: most notably Salesforce acquired Buddy Media and Radian6, Adobe acquired Context Optional (Efficient Frontier), and Oracle bought Vitrue and Involver. They may not be recognized as best-in-class, but at some point they will claim greater integration.

As much as Sprinklr and other social media management players like Hootsuite and Spredfast grow their capabilities, customers will eventually expect greater cross-channel coordination and integration.

The standalone enterprise social vendors still have time to address that concern, and may be able to develop ecosystem partnerships to provide their customers with this better integration. For example, Hootsuite has partnered with Marketo, to connect social interactions to lead databases.

For those standalone social players that have made it this far, the primary competition will soon be changing from other social vendors to the bigger, multi-channel marketing cloud solutions.

News of the acquisition previously broke here: Sprinklr buys social community provider Pluck off of Demand Media