This week Ottawa-based social analytics platform SWIX announced that is has rebranded to Source Metrics to help enterprise and agency customers tie social media marketing to their bottom line. The company first launched in 2010 to help SMBs and individuals track their social media activity on Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms, and had both an analytics product and marketing campaigns tool. The company raised $1.6 million in funding earlier this year from Canadian VC firm Growthworks and several angel investors to build out the new product, which they call a one-stop-shop for social marketers.
Source Metrics is trying to differentiate from other social media marketing analytics products by giving social marketers the ability to publish updates to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs, create shortened URLs to track campaigns across those networks, and then view analytics for up to 20 social accounts including Pinterest and Klout. The overall goal is to provide real-time details on how social media links equate to website traffic, leads, and sales.
Source Metrics founder and former Shopify co-founder Scott Lake said they decided to rebrand to focus on the enterprise market because SWIX’s products were features, not a comprehensive platform. They were also working with several enterprise customers who wanted custom dashboard, so they were building out a way to create shortened links, publish updates, and track conversions. “It was at that time that we realized that what we wanted to build was actually an enterprise product, instead of just features,” Lake said in an interview.
Once a company signs up they connect their social profiles, with the platform currently supporting Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (they will be adding blogs soon). Similar to a social media management tool like HootSuite, companies can then schedule messages to go out to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Each update is sent out with a different shortened URL so companies can track activity by network, and users can also create a custom shortened link to share in email marketing blasts. Every post is attributed to a campaign, for example a sales goal, community building, or support, so users can track how their goals are performing over time.
After updates are sent out, users can view clicks, conversions and sales by property, and also track their activity on other social networks like Pinterest. The goal is to help users track how their social media updates translate to their goals, whether that’s sales, signups, or traffic. Users also get a social media inbox, which displays replies across social networks ranked by reach and sentiment (positive or negative), so users can reply to their most influential fans.
“We want to provide people with the ability to launch a campaign, and then through an iterative process of continual improvement, we want to let them optimize that campaign as they go,” Lake said.
Companies can create and export reports on their social activity, and add branding, for example letting agencies add client branding before they present. Previously SWIX offered tiered accounts for individuals ($9/month), companies ($39/month) and agencies ($99/month), and now Source Metrics only provides custom enterprise pricing, with no accounts for individuals.
Lake said Source Metrics is part of the social marketing optimization trend, which aims to help companies go beyond just tracking social metrics and hone in on ROI. There are other companies trying to capitalize on that trend, from analytics tools like Radian6 and Sysomos, to publishing tools like Hootsuite, to social ROI tools like Sequentia Environics‘ Squeeze tool. Lake said while Radian6 is great for business intelligence, and Hootsuite is great for publishing, Source Metrics is really trying to be the one tool marketers can use to do everything from publish to tracking data. Squeeze is the most similar product, since it lets users create shortened URLs for each link they share online, and then lets them track which of those links turns into conversions and sales.
Lake said they used the funding earlier this year to build out the product, and will be focused on building hosted landing pages, so marketers could drive people to different landing pages based on the campaign and network. The goal down the road is to create a database of leads that have been collected through social media, so marketers can close the loop between social media marketing and sales. As for SWIX, Lake said they will be migrating customers over to Source Metrics and winding that service down. There are countlesss companies trying to measure the impact of social data, but focusing on ROI could prove to be Source Metrics’ biggest selling point for marketers looking to tie social media marketing to their bottom line.