Social media management has become an undeniable part of the growing cloud service sector, with a myriad of web and mobile apps requiring some level of unified communication tool.  Buddy Media saw an early opportunity in social media management, taking a big bet on Facebook’s platform success.  A few years later, Facebook’s platform is a thriving market, and Buddy Media is going global, even looking to expand beyond Facebook.

With 70% of Facebook’s users residing outside of the U.S., Buddy Media has found its needs shifting towards an international economy.  In going global last summer, Buddy Media took on the language barrier, adding support for European and Asian regions with its management tools.  It’s reflective of something larger at play, as Buddy Media stands in between a massive software market and an enterprise clawing away at it.

Having recently received $23 million in Series C funding, Buddy Media’s also hit a series of solid business milestones, adding over 600 business managers to its top advertising platform.  As one of the early entrants to this middle-man platform approach, Buddy Media’s also  managed to establish a new type of business when it comes to enterprise services and social media marketing.

“At the heart is the platform,” Joe Ciarallo, Director of Communications at Buddy Media tells me.  “You have to make sure the technology is there.  It varies across the board, depending on the brand.  Some are far along and have an internal social team.  Others give us the keys to the car and let us drive.  Other brands are still just launching or optimizing their campaigns, and come to us with more needs.  But all clients get a dedicated support person.”

It’s a path quite similar to what’s taking place at the cloud enterprise level, with unified communications dashboards piecing together a number of managment tools, sometimes from disparate vendors or from differentiated locations.  This part of the virtualization process has encouraged the rise of dedicated managed services, each taking on or automating another aspect of the cloud.  It’s one area Buddy Media will continue to grow, as it pushes forward with its worldwide reach.

“The funding is helping us to scale ahead of what we’re seeing in the space,” Ciarallo continues.  “In Q3 and Q4, we grew the business to onboard people faster.  We’ve hired 30 since, and on a product side, we launched Buddy Media University.  It’s our big education push, and it’s free for all clients.  We have in-person education and webcasts.  By the end of 2011, we’re shooting for 200 employees.”

Even with the rapid growth, Buddy Media has to deal with a growing line of competitive businesses, many of which contain a broader application method for managing social media, on Facebook and other sites.   To that, Ciarallo downplays other platforms, saying they don’t typically have the technical capabilities to do what they say they’re going to do.  “We know that Facebook has a global reach,” he goes on.  “Ad spending is increasing and the demand is here.  We will make changes as necessary, though.  We want to do Facebook well.  Twitter is awesome but Facebook is more dynamic.”

Analytics is the other area of great opportunity and growing demand, and it now has to be done in real time.  For big data management and enterprise clients, it’s the justification behind ad spending, board meetings and strategic planning for the upcoming quarter.  Buddy Media has always recognized the circuitry of Facebook’s own API, and sought to help clients navigate their app accordingly.

Scalability will be key for Buddy Media moving forward.  Using a combo of Amazon Web Services and MongoDB, Buddy Media scales its database nodes horizontally as their data collections grow and evolve.