Some Exciting News: Brandwatch Acquires PeerIndex

Hey everybody, I want to share some really exciting news with you. Brandwatch has acquired PeerIndex to bring its smart people and deep audience insights technology into the Brandwatch portfolio.

Let me tell you why.

We like focus

At Brandwatch we are building a new kind of intelligence. That has been our vision from the start – fusing massive computing with human smarts to give people the insights they need to act with more certainty.

During the course of the last seven years we have stayed focused on our core mission to build the best social media monitoring system in the world. And according to our customers, we have done it – as verified on G2 crowd, a business software review platform.

Expanding horizons

But the world doesn’t stand still and more important than getting to the number one spot for us at Brandwatch is that we relished the challenge and enjoyed the process of doing it. So we want to push on and expand our horizons to see what else we can achieve.

One part of that will be introducing new products like Vizia – and we’ll be bringing more new products to market in the coming years. Another part is improving what we already have.

Brandwatch Analytics is a content analysis tool at heart. Social media monitoring is the tagline, but we like to think that what we’ve created is a little bit more than just that.

Adding a new dimension

Until now, however, it has not been a very deep tool for understanding audiences – the people who create, read and share content. As we thought about this and started to piece together our ideas for how we could develop data and systems that would bring this fascinating information to light, I happened to be speaking at an event with Azeem Azhar.

As we talked, I became acutely aware that PeerIndex were years ahead of us in their understanding and technology for influencer analytics and mapping.

I thought that if we could add their technology and know-how into Brandwatch, we’d be able to create something that doesn’t exist in the market today.

A month later I called Azeem and asked him if he and his fellow PeerIndexers would consider joining Brandwatch. Six weeks after that we had signed the deal.

I’d like to welcome Azeem and the PeerIndex team to the Brandwatch family. We’ve been impressed with all of them and we can’t wait to combine our two technologies and make great products together.

What this means for Brandwatch

Approaching social media from the perspective of content is fundamental to knowing what is going on. We have built a very large machine that is great at finding, analysing and categorizing that content.

But one question Brandwatch struggles to answer is: why? Why did this message spread so quickly? And equally important, if a company wanted to have a good chance at making it happen again how should the content marketing team go about it?

Adding the PeerIndex data and technology into the heart of Brandwatch will help to answer these questions. We’ll know that a message spread because a particular person talked about it. And her audience acted as a link to a different – identified – network of people within which it was shared quickly and then five people in one of those networks shared it and it jumped to another group and so on and so forth.

As for how the marketing team might do it again, with this new data Brandwatch will be able to tell them who is most likely to want to read or watch their content and then share it, helping social media act like a wave not a ripple effect for content marketers.

Follow this downstream to clicks and onsite conversions and we have a clear ROI.

Just the start

There are other extremely compelling uses for this data. Over the last four years PeerIndex have built an astonishing index of information for over 300 million twitter users. Adding this data will dramatically increase depth of market research that can be done using Brandwatch Analytics.

We have also tasked our recently built Data Science team, which includes some brilliant Pure Maths and Physics PhDs, to find more connections and patterns using this data which we can build into the Analytics platform.

Our vision is to build a new type of intelligence and this is a new big step along that path.

Discipline makes daring possible

Over the last seven years, we have built the company bit by bit with talented people and together we bring discipline to this inherently creative pursuit of creating technology.

It’s this discipline that helps make this leap possible and I’d like to recognise and thank all the members of Brandwatch for their focus, and hard work over the years which has brought us to this point, and of course our customers who care deeply about us continuing to innovate and invest. Onwards my friends.

Now you know.