San Diego Social Media Management Startup Soci Adds $2.5M to Round

Soci logo used with permission

Soci, a social media content and marketing company that raised $1.5 million in late 2014, has raised an additional $2.5 million for its Series A Round, mostly from individual investors. In a statement yesterday, Soci said it plans to use the extra capital to help enterprises, multi-location brands, franchises, and digital agencies take a more scientific and scalable approach to social media management.

New investors included Taner Halicioglu, a San Diego angel investor who was Facebook’s first full-time, non-founding employee; Doug Hecht, the former president of Digitaria (acquired by J. Walter Thompson); and the venture capital fund GrowthX. Repeat investors Trevor and David Klein, co-founders of AutoAnything (acquired by AutoZone), and Asaf Benheim, founder of iMatrix (acquired by Internet Brands), also participated.

SOCi has developed a Web-based platform that enables big customers to take advantage of  social marketing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Soci said it has expanded from five customers in early 2015 to more than 85, including Yellow Pages, Rhino Linings, and Little Caesars.

The company said it has hired over 20 staffers in the past year, and plans to continue hiring this year.

Soci said its social media management technology is differentiated in two ways. The company said it combines all of the core management functionality—including scheduling, design, lead generation tools, analytics, and reporting—in a single platform. The company said its social teams also search for the social Web’s most engaging content, and use a proprietary algorithm to rank how compelling such social content is for users.

“This makes Soci an invaluable tool for brands and agencies that manage hundreds or thousands of social media accounts across different industries, locations, and cultures,” the company said in its statement.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.