MomentFeed Nabs $5.5M in Funding to Scale Social for Multi-location Brands

Local social media management has become a bigger and bigger part of brands’ marketing efforts in the past few years, as corporations try to create engagement and manage relevant information around specific locations. Los Angeles-based MomentFeed has built up an impressive roster of corporate clients in that time, driving the social marketing efforts of multi-location retailers like 7-Eleven, JCPenney and the Home Depot.

The company allows brands to manage location-specific messaging at scale, so that they can update Google+ pages, Facebook pages, Instagram, Twitter and more in a way that builds communities around the individual locations.

MomentFeed announced this morning that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A funding round led by Signia Venture Partners with Draper Nexus, DFJ Frontier, Double M Partners, and Daher Capital also participating. As part of the deal, Ed Cluss of Signia Venture Partners will join the company’s board. The company had raised a previous round of seed funding, totaling $3M; previous investors not part of this round include Gold Hill Capital and Factual founder Gil Elbaz.

Robert Blatt, who was quietly installed at MomentFeed’s CEO earlier this year, replacing founder Rob Reed, told Street Fight that the new funding would go toward further scaling MomentFeed’s platform to add more customers, including expanding its account management team.

Blatt also hinted that the company was planning to explore the online and mobile presence of physical locations as a marketable asset: “You’re going to see us eventually expand into things like paid media, and link the social activity to the business results.”

National brands, said Blatt, are still really grappling with the way consumers have fundamentally changed their expectations about what marketing is — particularly when it’s extended via mobile devices. The rise of mobile has made consumers demand immediacy, and has created an expectation of being able to communicate in a visual way with brands, and collaborate in the marketing process. Only in recent months have they begun to really make social media a core part of their marketing.

“Things like Facebook’s local pages, Google+, Instagram — those were not important at a local level to a national brand 24 months ago,” said Blatt. But now these are turning out to be among the most important communications channels.

David Hirschman is a co-founder of Street Fight.