How many times have you wished you could merge two of your favorite social management platforms in order to create one full-service platform? What if you could get in-depth analytics that transformed into actionable insights you could then act on--all in one platform? Well, today two companies made progress towards just that goal.
The social analytics platform, Sysomos, announced today it has acquired Expion, a platform for managing social enterprises through content marketing and publishing. With this acquisition, Sysomos says it aims to provide a "complete solution for creating your earned, shared, owned and paid media lifecycle and understanding how it drives your marketing success."
In their quest to build the "very best social intelligence platform in the world," the acquisition of Expion will add a new dimension to their thorough analytics offerings. Currently, Sysomos is built around social listening and data gathering. Clients now use Sysomos to follow social conversations across several platforms and use data and analytics to find insights into where their audience is and what they're talking about. Those insights are then made actionable, but then the client would have to go to another service to act. With the acquisition of Expion, Sysomos hopes that clients will stay in their platform to take action. Expion now helps brands with content marketing and publishing across platforms, as well as understanding and executing paid, earned, and organic social, but with limited analytics offerings.
TechCrunch talked to Sysomos CEO Lindsay Sparks, and they had this to say about the acquisition:
...The social media analytics space showed a lot of promise but hadn't been fully realized yet. "Today, you have data and listening and monitoring and community," he [Sparks] said. "But you have to tie them together to create a real end-to-end value proposition." Until now, Sysomos mostly focused on the data analysis side of the business, but its publishing features were rudimentary at best.
Expion's current client base is small at only 125 customers, but those customers are major, and they include Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Clinique, Barnes & Noble, Heinekin, Subway, Oreo, Porsche, Volvo, and many more. Sysomos, on the other hand, is a Twitter certified partner with exclusive access to Twitter data. Sysomos also has the bandwidth Expion does not, with more than a thousand clients. Expion will bring the big time client base, however, and together they could create a platform that has the potential to become a major player in the social marketing world.