As marketers become more sophisticated about the use of social media, Afif Khoury says it’s clear that increasing the size of your fan base can be a misleading statistic. It’s not enough to just sign up fans online.
Instead, the goal for social media marketing has shifted to building an audience that is engaged, and supportive of your business, cause, or community. “The key to social media is content,” Khoury says. “You can’t just inundate [fans] with coupons and deals.”
Managing social media is a complex challenge that requires a holistic approach, Khoury says. To address that challenge, he founded San Diego-based Soci, which he describes as “a unifying management platform for social media.”
Khoury, who also is affiliated with Scatter Ventures and Axon Ventures (two early stage venture firms that invest on behalf of high net worth individuals), says “Soci is doing for social media marketing what Moz did for SEO management,” a reference to the Seattle company that provides Web-based search engine analytics and marketing services.
Khoury founded Soci in mid-2012 to develop Web-based software that simplifies the management of social media marketing. To get through the first two years, Khoury says he raised about $500,000 in initial funding from Scatter Ventures and his own investment accounts. Now the startup is targeting media companies and the diverse market of small and medium businesses that they have traditionally served.
“We built this from the ground up to solve a very specific problem—how do you scale a social media management service, not just at a low cost, but at a low cost that can deliver actual results,” Khoury says. From the outset, Soci sought to integrate its social media-marketing platform with software tools for creating Web and mobile pages, reputation management, ad scheduling, and other operations.
“It’s built for scale and mass management,” Khoury says. “We built something that was intended to manage thousands of accounts.”
Soci now has nine employees and has been seeking customers among digital media companies, marketing agencies, and corporate marketing departments. Last week, Soci closed a $1.5 million Series A round led by
