Salesforce Acquires Buddy Media for 689 Million
According to industry sources, Salesforce.com is going to acquire social media marketing platform Buddy Media, and the deal is expected to be finalized for more than $800 million. Buddy Media runs marketing campaigns of different companies on well known social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. However there is some price issues going on between these two big companies, and the deal is likely to be done around $1 billion. Last year, Saleforce acquired Radian6 for $326 million.
In case the deal is confirmed within this price range, it would be the biggest acquisition to date in the social media marketing space. This deal clearly demonstrates that CRM is now moving from traditional sales process to more advanced marketing techniques such as handling branding and social media interactions with customers. If the acquisition happens, Salesforce will be in a position to vigorously manage marketing campaigns for companies and eventually extends their existence on social networks. This will ultimately help the companies to find more leads through social data. Since customers are spending most of their time on social media where they able to gather more social intelligence that is helpful for them to make business decisions.
In addition to that, Buddy has a huge client list, saying it works with top eight brands of the world. In the first quarter of 2012, Buddy managed to have 128 billion impressions that are more than 3 billion as compared to previous year.
The new executive vice president of Salesforce, John Wookey said that the organization’s social enterprise strategy is “at the root of the broad-based transformation and innovation we are seeing from customers today.”
Almost $90 million has been raised by Buddy Media in venture funding from various institutions like European Founders Fund, SoftBank Capital, WPP, Greycroft Partners, GGV Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and many other renowned companies such as Mark Pincus and Peter Thiel.
