SOCi, Inc., the next-generation social media content discovery and marketing company, has raised an additional $2.25 million to expand into new sales verticals and continue innovating its award-winning platform. New investors included Taner Halicioglu, Facebook's first full-time, non-founding employee, Doug Hecht, former COO and 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 Benhaim, founder of iMatrix (acquired by Internet Brands), also participated. SOCi will use the funding to help enterprises, multi-location brands, franchises, and digital agencies take a more scientific and scalable approach to social media management.

Founded in 2012, SOCi develops a scalable platform for enterprise social marketing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Since its hard launch in early 2015, SOCi has grown from serving a handful of partners to nearly 100, representing more than 3,000 businesses. They include well-known brands and enterprises such as Aflac, Rhino Linings, VCA Animal Hospitals and Sit n' Sleep. SOCi also serves over 40 percent of the National Multifamily Housing Council's 50 Largest Apartment Managers.

SOCi has hired over 20 new team members in the past year and will continue to hire aggressively in 2016. The add-on funding will complement the nearly $2 million SOCi has raised to date and will enable the company to continue this rapid growth.

'Our success in 2015 made it clear that the market was missing a social media management solution designed for the world's largest enterprises,' said Afif Khoury, CEO and founder of SOCi. 'With the new funding, SOCi will help more industries scale their social marketing and achieve the consistent, superior ROI that our partners have attained.'

Compared to typical social media management platforms, SOCi has two key differentiators. First, SOCi combines all of the core management functionality - including scheduling, design, lead generation tools, analytics, and reporting - into a single platform. By providing everything an enterprise needs for social media, SOCi saves companies from wrangling multiple, disconnected point solutions that jam up the marketing workflow.

Second, SOCi helps social teams find the social web's most engaging content. The platform's proprietary algorithm ranks social content on a zero through ten scale by analyzing more than 84 attributes. Thus, users can search and post proven content on any subject matter, regardless of their familiarity with the industry. 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.

'SOCi is not for people who tweet from their couch,' said Taner Hacioglu, creator of Facebook's infrastructure. 'As an investor, I'm impressed by SOCi's ability to provide a social media management platform that works for complex, global businesses. The fact that social teams can gauge how well content will perform before they even post it is extremely powerful. Social media is normally a trial and error endeavor - SOCi has made it more scientific than ever before.'

About SOCi

SOCi is the leading enterprise solution for social content discovery and social media marketing. SOCi's next-generation social media SaaS platform utilizes a proprietary scoring algorithm to discover, evaluate, and rank social content, changing how enterprises, franchises, and affiliates market on social media to their target audiences. SOCi's Smart Scheduler, Design Hub, Lead-Gen tools, Analytics, and Reporting enable all types of businesses to manage hundreds of social media accounts while efficiently generating measurable results at scale.