Zocial Brings Thailand’s Social Media Monitoring Expertise to Indonesia, Ready to Compete with Country’s Finest

Thailand’s social media monitoring tool Zocial Inc today just announced its plan to expand to Indonesia through a joint venture partnership with media conglomerate MNC. The cooperation will see the Zocial team learning the Indonesian market through the guidance of MNC, as well as opening sales and service channels in the country.

Zocial Inc chose Indonesia as the first country to expand to. Naturally, because the country has excellent social media activities. Starting next month, the team will roll out its two social media monitoring tools ZocialEye and ZocialRank to Indonesian users. Furthermore, MNC plans to hold social media awards for individuals called the Zocial Award in the future.

The team explains their first priority would be to improve their own system like how they track customer behavior on social media sites. And afterwards, to localize their language system to the Indonesian language so that they can identify positive and negative sentiments more accurately.

It is interesting to note that the Indonesia expansion is just the company’s first step toward preparation for the upcoming ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). Zocial plans to expand to other countries within the ASEAN region in the coming years. MNC, on the other hand, looks to be very welcoming to foreign startups with other joint ventures with China-based WeChat and the partnership with Japan-based e-commerce site Rakuten Belanja Online.

The ones who will be welcoming Zocial’s arrival in Indonesia are startups venturing in the same space here like NoLimit, MediaWave, and Brand24, to name a few. It’ll be interesting to see who will come out on top when it comes to understanding the Indonesian language. A few would argue that locals should know better, but the MNC partnership can definitely tilt the advantage to the Thai startup.

In April this year, Zocial was also part of our Startup Arena pitching battle at Startup Asia Singapore 2013.