A month ago, we proudly announced that we were acquiring the influencer marketing platform Paladin. 

Today, as the deal has officially closed, we are sharing three exciting updates on how we are merging Paladin into the rest of the Brandwatch suite:

  1. Paladin users can now log in with their Falcon credentials
  2. Falcon Suite customers now get free trial access to Paladin's influencer discovery module
  3. We're rolling out these two new initiatives under the product name Influence

For the first time, we’re also offering a sneak peek on our long-term vision for combining social media management and influencer marketing into the most unified social media marketing platform in the market.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s have a closer look at the three main announcements.

One login for all social media marketers

First of all, we've now enabled Single Sign-on between our social media management solution Falcon and Paladin. From now on, any individual with user access to both platforms can now use their Falcon credentials to log in to both platforms.

This is a fundamental step towards creating a unified solution for all disciplines of social media marketing – one place to manage organic brand content, paid ads, and influencer collaborations.

Free trial: Influencer discovery module

We want our acquisition of Paladin to immediately benefit as many of our customers as possible. That's why we're now providing all Suite customers of Falcon free access to a trial edition of Paladin's influencer discovery module.

The module enables searching, filtering, and segmenting against a dataset of over 30 million influencer profiles across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.Later this spring, we plan to expand this trial to also include all Falcon Essentials customers, as well as all customers of Brandwatch Consumer Research.

Meet Influence

We are combining these two new initiatives and reinventing Paladin as Influence.

Starting today, current Suite users of Falcon will see a new Influence product in their main menu bar. Clicking on this will lead them to the Paladin product, either in free trial edition or with full feature access, if they've already purchased the product.

The Paladin brand will still exist for some time while we work on transitioning their features, users, and assets into this new identity. As we continue to roll out new capabilities in Falcon and Brandwatch over the coming months, you will come to know it as Influence.

The challenge

When we first started exploring the broader ecosystem of influencer marketing tools, we saw some great solutions that had really doubled down on building workflows for discovering, managing, and co-creating with influencers. Paladin stood out among the most complete solutions in the market. 

But what we also saw was that all of these platforms were still living in silos, disconnected from broader marketing teams, workflows, and insights.

This is a big challenge for brands who struggle to maintain an overview, benchmark initiatives, and increase transparency across teams and departments.

Here's a concrete example:

Imagine you plan to run a campaign with a popular TikTok creator around a new product launch. This will not be the only initiative your marketing department will run to support this event. There will most likely also be paid ads and organic posts on your own social media channels.

Now, imagine that you could see all these initiatives in a single unified campaign calendar. Meanwhile, a unified performance dashboard would instantly compare the ROI of your ads to your influencer posts so you'd know exactly how to most effectively invest additional budget.

Finally, imagine you could easily generate insights on how your influencer campaigns impacted key brand metrics like share of voice, brand sentiment, or overall brand affinity.

The vision

These challenges, and many more, are what Brandwatch has excelled at solving over the past decade. By combining forces with Paladin, we are now in a great position to bridge the gap between influencer marketing and social media marketing teams.

Our vision for the future, as we gradually transition Paladin over to Influence is that in parallel we build out smart integrations with our Publish, Engage, Measure, and Advertise products in Falcon, as well as with Brandwatch Consumer Research to create the most unified and intelligent social marketing platform on the market.

While some of these integrations will obviously take a bit of time for our engineers to build, we hope that today's announcements are clear indications that we are pursuing our roadmap aggressively with our eyes firmly fixed at the horizon.

We are excited to continue sharing updates with you over the coming months as we accomplish more of these ambitions and bring the product closer to realizing our vision.