SAN DIEGO, Nov. 17, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — SOCi, the social content discovery engine and next-generation social media marketing technology, announced a $1.5 million Series A funding round led by angel investor Peter Fisher with anchor participation by Silicon Valley Growth Syndicate. SOCi will leverage the funding to expand its social content discovery, scoring and management SaaS solution to national digital service providers, media outlets, marketing agencies, national franchises and enterprise clients.

Built on a social content discovery platform, SOCi empowers clients with a massively scalable social media operation. Discovering and scoring social content according to its success engaging target audiences, SOCi lets clients re-source content with one-click design and scheduling tools to create programmatic social media content cycles.

” SOCi is doing for social media marketing what Moz did for SEO management,” said SOCi CEO Afif Khoury. “By scoring the social web, we’ve made it possible for anyone to serve as an extremely savvy social media manager. And by analyzing and scoring content consumers are responding to, SOCi makes experienced social media managers more efficient and effective.”

” SOCi is an exciting opportunity that brings a new technology-based approach to the rapidly growing social media marketing business,” said lead investor Peter Fisher. “I’m looking forward to working closely with Afif and the SOCi team as they expand the platform and grow into new markets.”

Led by Shepherd Ventures co-founder and renewable energy investor and operator Peter Fisher, the group of angel investors includes Asaf Benhaim, founder of iMatrix, which was recently acquired by Internet Brands, Inc., as well as Trevor Klein and David Klein, co-founders of AutoAnything.com, which was recently acquired by AutoZone.

SOCi, which beat out Qualcomm’s ImpaQt to take SDX’s 2014 “Innovator of the Year” award in October, is shown to drastically reduce management time per client and drive an average of 250% rise in engagement (measured by social signals including likes, shares, retweets, and comments) compared with first-generation social media tools like HootSuite and SproutSocial.

About SOCi

Led by noted digital entrepreneur Afif Khoury, SOCi offers big brands, major national franchises, as well as corporate marketing networks, the ability to identify social content succeeding with target audiences, using it to build programmatic content streams across major social platforms. SOCi has been nationally recognized and recently named SDX’s 2014 Innovator of the Year. For more information, visit the company’s site at www.meetsoci.com.