Any social media man­ag­er or com­mu­ni­ty man­ag­er with an ear to the ground for inno­v­a­tive ideas will find it hard to be any­thing oth­er than impressed by the suc­cess of celebri­ty endorse­ment plat­form, Adly, which has just raised a fur­ther $2 mil­lion in funding.

The com­pa­ny has become some­thing of a top dog in the social media celebri­ty endorse­ment cor­ner in a very short space of time (essen­tial­ly, it con­nects brands with celebri­ties who are will­ing to pro­mote mes­sages on social net­works). The lat­est fund­ing round, which was led by its pre­vi­ous backer GRP Part­ners, takes the total raised by the start­up so far to $7.5 mil­lion. Siemer Ven­tures, a new investor for the firm, also took part.

Match-mak­ing

The lat­est fund­ing coin­cides with the launch of a new Adly prod­uct – the “Match Me Up!” ana­lyt­ics ser­vice. This ana­lyzes a company’s cur­rent con­tent and fol­low­ers on social sites and then match­es it up with the most rel­e­vant pub­lish­ers to “ampli­fy” the company/brand mes­sage. Our intre­pid social media man­ag­er will doubt­less be won­der­ing how it does that.  Put sim­ply: just sign in with a Twit­ter account and Adly imme­di­ate­ly sets about iden­ti­fy­ing celebri­ty pub­lish­ers. Then it cal­cu­lates how many times your reach and engage­ment can be enhanced through their col­lec­tive endeavors.

But if you’re a social media man­ag­er want­i­ng to give this a try, you’ll find that you won’t know exact­ly who the celebri­ty pub­lish­ers are until you sign up for an actu­al Adly cam­paign. But the ser­vice does pro­vide basic descrip­tions and sta­tis­tics about the pub­lish­ers so it’s not sim­ply a shot in the dark.

Tak­ing engage­ment seriously

Adly’s CEO, Wal­ter Delph, who took up his post less than a year ago, says that the new prod­uct is part of a longer strat­e­gy.  And he makes a per­sua­sive point: adver­tis­ers using Adly don’t sim­ply gain access to a mul­ti­tude of eye­balls, they also get gen­uine engage­ment, as fol­low­ers launch con­ver­sa­tions about the brand. The reach, Delph says, is earned rather than mere­ly paid for.
More tools to enhance social con­ver­sa­tion and engage­ment are in the pipeline.

And it’s a lit­tle mis­lead­ing to con­sid­er the firm a celebri­ty-only endorse­ment net­work. In addi­tion to its 2,000 rec­og­niz­able stars, it’s also cul­ti­vat­ed rela­tion­ships with 73,000 non-celeb social influ­encers, all of whom are high­ly valu­able to advertisers.