There are a lot of social monitoring products existing online. One of the latest additions to this populated market is Sprout Social, which was announced just today. It enables businesses to monitor all their social networks across the internet on a single web-based dashboard. This includes Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. What’s its point of differentiation in a rapidly crowding market?  From Sprout Social:

“We’ve put the most comprehensive set of business oriented tools in one place to help you manage your entire social presence brilliantly. We connected all the major networks, built tools to make sense of the information and invented new ways to connect with highly-targeted potential customers. Then we made it elegant and easy to use. Finally we baked-in best practices and plenty of tools to nudge you in the right direction.”

The company was founded last 2009 funded by Groupon founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell through Lightbank. The combined offering of social media management and analytics is one way Sprout Social hopes to stand out from the crowd.  There will be several verticals that continue to launch around social media data aggregation, analysis and management, and it will be some time before the best practices and standards are delineated.