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Hootsuite said the deal means it will be able to give businesses a social media performance engine that can ‘turn insights into action into impact’ with the support of AI.
Hootsuite, the social media management software firm, is expanding its services with the acquisition of social listening platform Talkwalker.
Talkwalker describes itself as a consumer intelligence platform that uses AI technology to help its clients understand social media data. The platform ‘listens’ to various public conversations taking place across social media to help clients understand more about markets and consumers.
Talkwalker claims it is already used by more than 2,500 brands including Adidas, Hello Fresh and Luxair. Hootsuite claims it will use Talkwalker’s technology to help its customers boost their social media management and customer engagement.
By combining the two platforms, Hootsuite claims it will be able to give businesses a social media performance engine to can “turn insights into action into impact” with the support of AI. The company claims customers will be able to increase their brand awareness and get “global listening coverage” of more than 100 social networks.
Hootsuite CEO Irina Novoselsky said the company has had “listening for years” but that it was “industry standard”.
“While that worked then, the industry is entering a new era of social media performance,” Novoselsky said. “To achieve this, we’re building a social media performance engine, a feedback loop where AI takes consumer data and generates insights for actionable strategies and measurable impact.
“The combination of social listening’s best insights technology, Talkwalker, brought into Hootsuite, will leapfrog the industry into the future of social marketing.”
Hootsuite has made more than a dozen acquisitions since its founding in 2008, with offices in Canada, the US, Europe and Australia. In 2021, the company acquired Sparkcentral in order to push into “social customer care”.
At the time of the acquisition, Sparkcentral had raised more than $37m from investors and built tools for businesses to connect with customers through messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Messenger.
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