Follower-Tracker SocialRank Launches Teams Version On Road To Becoming Audience Management Platform

Sure, you have a zillion followers on Twitter. But do they help you market or sell your products?

That’s the need SocialRank seeks to fill. Today, the New York City-based company is announcing a Teams version that allows multiple users in an organization to log in with their email addresses, get access to one or more of a brand’s multiple accounts on Twitter and Instagram and work together on the accounts’ administration.

Permissions can also be set up by department, like Communications or Human Resources:

With SocialRank, a brand can segment its followers on those social networks, build lists of key influencers, conduct “surprise and delight” campaigns like raffles for the most engaged followers and invite the most enthusiastic followers to a local event near them.

SocialRank for Teams also includes the ability to run Market Intel, which recently emerged from its beta phase. It lets teams manage a brand’s public Twitter or Instagram accounts through SocialRank, to send news or direct messages to followers, for instance.

But Teams is only one step in the company’s big plans for follower management. CEO and founder Alex Taub told me that the upgrade points to a new direction for SocialRank, as it moves from being a social analytics tool to becoming a collaborative audience management platform and eventually, a kind of customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

He pointed to the “macro focus” of most social media management or analysis tools, like Sysomos or Sprinklr, which concentrate on tracking numbers, engagement and sentiments of followers without really managing them as customers.

The closest competitor, he said, is FollowerWonk, although he criticized that software as being “all over the place and hard to use.”

“I’d love to be able to tell Nike, ‘Out of your five million followers, [this] many are in your database,” he said, without having to export the followers list and then having to undergo the arduous process of matching followers to profiles in the CRM.

Taub said he founded the company in 2014 because there were “tons of tools [for] what hashtags to use and how they’re performing, but I couldn’t find audience management tools.”