Viralheat, a social media marketing platform, announced today the launch of a developer platform to help make apps more social by streamlining the process of integrating any one if its existing or new APIs. Launched in 2009, the company’s social media management solution now used by more than 12,000 brands and agencies in over 80 countries worldwide to manage multiple accounts, and manage their social media monitoring, analytics, lead generation and reporting.
The company had a number of APIs that developers have been using to better integrate social data, sentiment analysis, publishing, and monitoring into their applications. It is now also unveiling a new Human Intent Analysis API, which aims to help generate better leads and predict purchase intent, in addition to a link shortening API. The company’s Sentiment Analysis API is the most popular, receiving more than one billion calls per week, and used by more than 2,500 developers.
“We’ve really made it easy to manage all your streams and view all your advance publishing, and all the analytics and reporting. We wanted to take all that and make it available to developers,” said Raj Kadam, co-founder of Viralheat, in an interview with BetaKit. “One of our most popular adoptions has been Sentiment Analysis, a new API we’re launching is Human Intent, and let’s say you tweet ‘I broke my laptop,’ you could send that back to Viralheat and we could tell you, yes they’re in the market for a computer.”
The company is also announcing launch partners for its developer program including SocialChorus, which tracks advocate and consumer social actions, and is leveraging Viralheat’s suite of APIs, specifically sentiment analysis, to deliver real-time analysis of advocate comments. Another launch partner is Anametrix Digital Analytics, which uses the company’s APIs to help its clients correlate social data with the performance of online advertising efforts on Google Adwords, DoubleClick and other paid channels, providing insights into the actual cost per acquisition (CPA) for each new user.
The extension into providing a developer platform is one key differentiator for the company from the slew of competitors that provide social media management tools including Salesforce’s Radian6 and Buddy Media, as well others including Wishpond, Source Metrics, and SocialBakers. The other according to Kadam has been the price at which if offers its service, starting at $9.99 for a pro account, $99 for a premium account, and $499 for an enterprise account, which it believes has allowed it to scale. “If you look at anyone else in the market whether it’s Radian6 or Sprout Social, we’ve actually built our technology to scale, we don’t outsource anything. Everything is built internally, everything is elastic, everything is incredibly scalable, and we came out with a plan starting at $10, which is completely unheard of,” Kadam added.
Up next Viralheat is working on releasing complementary mobile apps for its dashboards, with Kadam acknowledging that community managers are increasingly working at odd hours and don’t always want to be tied to a computer. With the launch of its developer platform, the company hopes to give developers the necessary tools to more efficiently build social data into their apps leveraging social data, giving it another target market for its platform. Whether it can compete with industry leaders like the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is another question.