Buddy Media Inc., which makes social-networking management tools for businesses, is forging closer ties to Google Inc. (GOOG) (GOOG) as Facebook Inc. (FB) (FB) represents a smaller slice of its business.
Buddy Media introduced a partnership with Google's YouTube today that lets businesses customize their video pages. That builds on a set of offerings that already work with Google+, the social network, which Buddy Media Chief Executive Officer Michael Lazerow said is an essential feature because it ranks high in Google searches.
Lazerow said managing clients' presence on Facebook, once the company's sole focus, now makes up 30 percent to 40 percent of its work as customers ask for tools for other social-media sites. Buddy Media has about 900 clients, Lazerow said. These include Ford Motor Co., Johnson & Johnson and Sony Corp., according to the company's website.
"We went from a very Facebook-focused business to a Web- wide focus," Lazerow said today in an interview at the company's new headquarters in New York. "It's not just about Facebook, it's about all of these channels a company has to manage."
In order to complete the YouTube deal, Buddy Media had to persuade Google to open its programming interface to modifications, Lazerow said. Now clients can offer a branded video player, link images and offer quizzes to their users, letting them vote for content they like the most.
The YouTube tools also can target ads based on geography -- a necessary feature for companies that operate globally in different languages, he said.
"The YouTube change was a huge shift in their thinking about monetization," Lazerow said, declining to comment on financial terms of the deal.
The market for social-media tools will more than double to $970 million in 2016, from $389 million this year, according to Forrester Research Inc. On Facebook, advertisements generated $3.15 billion in revenue last year, 85 percent of total sales (FB), and many of the ads direct users to brand pages managed by companies such as Buddy Media.
To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Frier in New York at sfrier1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
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