Hootsuite, a global leader in social media management, has acquired Talkwalker, a leading AI-powered social listening solution.

Hootsuite works with over 200,000 businesses in more than 200 countries.

UK and EMEA customers include Boots, Nandos and Bacardi and the company employs 1,000 people globally

The acquisition follows Hootsuite’s latest research, which found only 56 per cent of organisations believe they truly grasp the business impact and ROI of their social media strategies.

Hootsuite exists to help customers unlock the value of their social media relationships and by acquiring Talkwalker, businesses will, for the first time, have a social media performance engine to turn insights into action into impact, all fuelled by AI.

Irina Novoselsky (pictured), CEO of Hootsuite, said: “We have had listening for years. 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.

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“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 the world’s best insights technology, Talkwalker, brought into Hootsuite, leapfrogs the industry into the future of social marketing.”

With Hootsuite and Talkwalker combined, customers can expect to:

  • Increase brand awareness: Predictive analytics and social intelligence will provide forward-looking insights before it starts and get your brand noticed in the larger conversation;
  • Drive lead generation:Drive more qualified leads into a seller’s funnel from social through a deeper understanding of audience intent;
  • Get global listening coverage:Offering comprehensive reach across 100+ social networks and 150 million websites;
  • Experience AI built for social: BlueSilkTM GPT is AI built for social marketers from a data set exclusively built from billions of real-time, unsampled data from across the web and social.
  • Work in a single control room of insight, action and impact: AI-powered social intelligence quickly informs the user with insights to help them post across all their social channels and analyse the impact against business metrics, turning Hootsuite into an all-in-one social media performance engine