Netvibes, the San Francisco-based startup that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS feed dashboards, has added social analytics capabilities to its web content monitoring platform. But can the six-year-old company hold its own among today’s super-charged social media analytics startups?
Netvibes’ new product suite, dubbed “social pack,” is currently available in private beta for existing Netvibes premium dashboard customers. The features will be available to individuals by month’s end, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini told me in an interview this week.
With the latest additions, Netvibes is solidifying its new status as a enterprise software-as-a-service company — a significant step beyond the consumer RSS feed aggregator it started as.
Netvibes is smart to move from courting individual people to entire companies: The web monitoring space has proven to be a lucrative one for startups targeting brands in recent years. Social media monitoring company Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce.com for some $ 326 million back in March, and brand management startup Scout Labs was acquired last year for a reported $ 20-plus million.
That said, Netvibes itself is not exactly green to the startup game. The company was founded in 2005, and has had its fair share of managerial drama and strategy pivots along the way. But the company has stood on its own throughout: Netvibes has turned a profit since 2009 and has only one round of funding in its history, Mini told me. In a press release Friday the company claims it still has an edge on the newcomers, saying that its newest offerings provide monitoring and analytics “in ways never before possible.”
I demoed the new Netvibes offerings — and though I’m not in charge of a brand or company (beyond my own, I suppose) I can see the appeal of the social pack service. The social analytics capabilities are quite comprehensive, and should prove popular among the company’s existing customers, many of whom populate the Fortune 500 list. But it bears mention that Netvibes is not the only company offering products to help brands and customers monitor what is being said about them in real-time on the web.
Netvibes’ solid position as a safe bet for its existing customers have kept it in the game thus far, and its strategy to go after the growth market or brands and social media is a wise one. Whether it can continue to hold its ground in today’s world of hyper-funded and hungry social media analytics startups remains to be seen.
Here is a screenshot of Netvibes’ new social pack dashboard:
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