Spredfast, recently a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, has raised $1.6 million in funding from Austin Ventures. This marks the first financing secured by the startup, which markets a social media management platform for businesses.
Spredfast enables companies to manage social media campaigns and customer acquisition initiatives through one dashboard, across multiple platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr. It also supports WordPress, Blogger, MoveableType, Lotus Live Connections, Drupal and most XML-RPC enabled blogging platforms.
Spredfast’s platform integrates with Omniture and Google Analytics, thus complementing traditional web analytics with ‘social media analytics’. Additionally, users can automate their social media processes and allow multiple users to collaborate at once with its content management and workflow features.
Pricing ranges from free (limited in features) to $100 per initiative per month.
The startup, which counts five employees, competes with CoTweet, which was recently acquired by ExactTarget for over $8.1 million.
Some of the customers it has already signed up since its public launch in January: IBM, HP, AOL, Doner and Oracle.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZKEW6G-SUE&w=620&h=480&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00]
