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Hootsuite is set to acquire Luxembourg-based artificial intelligence (AI) consumer intelligence and social listening company Talkwalker for an undisclosed amount.

Hootsuite said the deal is aimed at helping its customers get more out of their social media relationships and will fuel the Vancouver tech company’s shift in focus from social media management to data-driven, intelligent decision making. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2024.

“The industry is entering a new era of social media performance.”

Irina Novoselsky

Talkwalker and Hootsuite have worked together for several years, first partnering on an integration in 2015 that allowed users to incorporate analytics into their social engagement and content development efforts.

Founded in 2009, Talkwalker offers a consumer intelligence platform that combines internal and external data sources with Blue Silk GPT, a generative AI tool that classifies and summarizes conversations and turns consumers into actionable “clusters” to help companies target them more effectively.

Social listening, which Talkwalker specializes in, refers to the process of analyzing online conversations about a brand or industry to learn more about an audience. “We have had listening for years,” Hootsuite CEO Irina Novoselsky said in a statement. “But it was industry standard, just like everyone else’s. “While that worked then, the industry is entering a new era of social media performance.”

Novoselsky said Hootsuite is building a “social media performance engine” that uses AI to generate new insights from consumer data. “The combination of social listening’s best insights technology, Talkwalker, brought into Hootsuite, will leapfrog the industry into the future of social marketing,” she added.

With this acquisition, Hootsuite is hoping to better serve its customers through increased brand awareness through predictive analytics, lead generation, global listening coverage, and AI-powered insights to help boost the impact of social content. Customers will also now have access to Talkwalker’s Blue Silk GPT.

Founded in 2008, Hootsuite offers social media management software that provides customers with content scheduling, content creation, and social media analytics. According to a report from Axios, the company now has over 200,000 paid customers, 6,000 of those being enterprise customers.

The last few years have not exactly been smooth sailing for the Vancouver-based company. Following several rounds of layoffs, Hootsuite appointed Novoselsky as CEO last year. Novoselsky took over from Tom Keiser, who held the role of CEO for three years after founder Ryan Holmes departed in November 2019. 

Last year saw more changes at the top. During 2023, Hootsuite brought in Jessica Hartigan as chief revenue officer, Ellen Terchila as chief customer officer, Elina Vilk as chief marketing officer, and Dave Wynne as chief financial officer. Also last year, Hootsuite eliminated its free plan for users, weeks after Twitter first announced that it is ending free access to its application programming interface service.

Feature image courtesy Hootsuite.