Startup: Hearsay Social raised $18 million in funding

San Francisco-based Hearsay Social, a corporate social media management platform has just raised $18 million in Series B funding round led by New Enterprise Associates.

Hearsay Social is developed with the idea of creating and utilizing social media as brand engagement, as well as keeping corporations and employees out of trouble on the internet. The platform is developed by Clara Sih, author of The Facebook Era, a New York Times bestselling book about utilizing Facebook for marketing.

The funding is planned for expansion by hiring individuals to join its sales and engineering teams, which are also joined by NEA’s Jon Sakoda together with his fleet of experienced sales team.

“On the hiring front, sales and engineering are top priorities, but we are hiring across the board, every department,” said Shih.

Also, Hearsay Social added new features to its product for companies that include corporate and local structure and the ability to run integrated social campaigns to several applications such as Facebook ads, page posts and page tab applications.

With the integrated social campaigns feature, clients can schedule and run coordinated marketing campaigns across the social networks and their features – Facebook ads, Facebook Page tab applications, and posts over Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Another new feature is rogue page finders that help companies to identify unauthorized Facebook page, Twitter account, videos over Youtube and others. Once they are identified, the company can opt to contact the hosting platform and ask them to be shut down or combined into the official presence. Hence, companies can find infamous videos before it reaches millions viewers.

Among the successful stories heard from clients is State Farm Insurance, which has successfully grown its social media workforce to over 16,000 employees in 16 weeks.

Hearsay Social is run with 30 employees and counting. It competes with Socialware and Vitrue, but the two competitors are claimed not to offer such services as Hearsay Social.

To this date, Hearsay Social has raised $21 million with a list of investors that include Sequoia Capital, Micahel Abbott (VP of engineering at Twitter), Dave Morin (co-founder of Path) and Steve Chen (co-founder of YouTube).