New York has just been invad­ed by the Danes; but if any NYC social media man­agers out there are think­ing of ram­pag­ing Vikings, they needn’t pan­ic. This is a friend­ly inva­sion, in the form of Copen­hagen-head­quar­tered social media mar­ket­ing start­up Fal­con Social, which has just opened a brand new office in the Big Apple.

Why New York?

But why, the curi­ous social media man­ag­er may well be ask­ing, would a Dan­ish social media com­pa­ny come to New York? Fal­con Social’s soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice helps busi­ness­es mon­i­tor and man­age social media. And, since many of those busi­ness­es (like Coca Cola, Condé Nast, Dis­ney and Pan­do­ra) are For­tune 500 busi­ness­es based in the USA, the move to New York just seems logical.

It won’t have escaped the atten­tion of most social media man­agers that there are a lot of com­pa­nies in New York that offer pret­ty sim­i­lar ser­vices – track­ing a client company’s social media inter­ac­tions, pub­lish­ing con­tent like blog posts and eval­u­at­ing the per­for­mance of the over­all social media strat­e­gy. But Fal­con Social’s founder and CEO, Ulrik Bo Larsen, says his prod­uct is sig­nif­i­cant­ly different.

A uni­fied ser­vice to take on the “Franken-suites”

“It’s not enough to have a Radian6 [soft­ware] instal­la­tion and lis­ten to stuff,” says Larsen. “You also need to engage.”

Fal­con Social’s com­peti­tors, he says, typ­i­cal­ly cob­ble their plat­forms togeth­er from a smor­gas­bord of dif­fer­ent parts by get­ting oth­er ven­dors to build what he dubs “Franken-suites”. His com­pa­ny offers a far more uni­fied ser­vice which he’s con­fi­dent will lure plen­ty of cus­tomers away from the com­pe­ti­tion (whose offer­ings, he believes, are dif­fi­cult to use and often don’t cov­er all the bases their client com­pa­nies need to mon­i­tor). As he puts it, “There are so many things still not being solved by the incum­bents among big U.S. soft­ware companies.”

And Fal­con Social’s suc­cess rather backs up his con­fi­dent claims: just 18 months after its launch in 2010, it grew from a com­pa­ny of four to over 100 employ­ees. And last year, it raised $8 mil­lion in Series A (or  €6 mil­lion), which Larsen says was used to scale the orga­ni­za­tion fur­ther beyond Europe and to take on com­peti­tors like Ora­cle, Adobe Social and Hoot­Suite.

The New York office will begin with an empha­sis on sales, but Larsen plans to grow the company’s pres­ence in the city.