We wanted to take a quick look at some of the moving and shaking that happened on the 2011 social media mergers and acquisitions front.
There were a lot of big deals struck. Gowalla being bought by Facebook. Tweetdeck getting acquired by Twitter. But there were plenty of acquisitions that you might not of heard that much about, if at all. And plenty of them will affect how many of us do business moving forward.
Big names on the list that you will see more than once include the Google, king of social Facebook, increasingly social media focused Salesforce, up and comer HubSpot, and .com veteran eBay.
Facebook and Talent
Facebook looks keen to continue to acquire small startups with lots of programming talent (Beluga, Gowalla). Their focus is innovation and not getting stuck in the MySpace death spiral.
Consolidation and Domination
Salesforce and HubSpot (Performable and Oneforty) are both building very robust one stop shops for marketers. Salesforce has been impressive in their move into social. Acquiring Radian6 showed us how committed to social media marketing support they are. Their purchase of Rypple tells us that they are looking at social business as well.
Tools and Services
And several tools that you may use changed hands this year. Tweetdeck, Radian6. Twitterfeed, Rypple and more. If you are using these services you likely already have the news. And then several services have or will be leaving us this year due to acquisition, mainly location and group text apps like GroupMe, Beluga, Whrrl and Gowalla.
- Bantam Live acquired by Constant Contact
- Beluga acquired by Facebook
- Blue Sky Factory acquired by WhatCounts
- Context Optional acquired by Efficient Frontier (then acquired by Adobe)
- DimDim acquired by Salesforce
- Flowtown acquired by Demand Force
- Geotoko acquired by Hootsuite
- Gowalla acquired by Facebook
- GroupMe acquired by Skype (then acquired by Microsoft)
- Hunch acquired by eBay
- Katango acquired by Google
- Kosmix acquired by Walmart
- Magneto acquired by eBay
- Myspace acquired by Specific Media
- Next New Networks acquired by Youtube (Google)
- OneForty acquired by HubSpot
- Performable acquired by HubSpot
- PostRank acquired by Google
- Radian6 acquired by Salesforce
- Rypple acquired by Salesforce
- SimpleGeo acquired by Urban Airship
- SocialMedia.com acquired by LivingSocial
- Sometrics acquired by AMEX
- Tagged acquired by Hi5
- Tweetdeck acquired by Twitter
- Twitterfeed acquired by Bit.ly
- Where acquired by eBay
- Whrrl acquired by Groupon
- WuFoo acquired by SurveyMonkey
- Zagat acquired by Google
- Mr Youth acquired by LBi
- RightNow Technologies acquired by Oracle
And honorable mention goes to the 3 huge blogs that were acquired this year, HuffingtonPost acquired by AOL, Tech Crunch acquired by AOL, and RWW acquired by Say Media. Not social media companies necessarily, but worth noting for the industry. Blogging is becoming big business.