Talkwalker, a social listening and analytics company that empowers over 2,000 brands and agencies to optimize the impact of their communication efforts. They provide companies with an easy-to-use platform to protect, measure, and promote their brands worldwide, across all communication channels.
Pragati Basu, Marketing – India and ROW, Talkwalker, shares her insights and Talkwalkers tie-up with Quora.
Can you tell us in simple lay man’s terms as to what do you mean by Social Listening?
Social listening is listening to the conversation around your brand/hashtags or competitors, with the aim of deriving meaningful, actionable insights that will help you grow your business and co-create content with your audience.
More often than not, this means keeping your eyes on social networks as well as blogs, online news, and more. With new platforms for communication and content distribution being established so often, social listening is gaining importance as an essential tracking tool. A social listening tool collects the data and organizes it so any advertiser or marketer can work on the actionable insights derived from it.
How Talkwater involved in this business, also how is data collected?
Social listening forms the backbone of Talkwalker’s business. We collect, curate and analyze data from traditional, digital and social media. Across online and offline channels, to help marketing and public relations professionals improve the impact of their communication efforts.
All of the data we analyze comes from publicly available information. So, for instance – we have no access to private Facebook pages or Instagram accounts. Technically speaking, we collect data in two different ways. We use crawlers to go through information across the internet, and then pull the most relevant information for our 2000+ clients. And, for social networks we usually have access to APIs from the networks themselves that allow us to look at data from there.
This crisis has thrown Social Media and digital in the limelight all the more, how are brands using this opportunity to connect with their consumers/Audiences and how can social listening help them build a stronger connect?
Absolutely – digital is the way forward and in the current scenario, it’s the only way to go. At this time, brands are focused on staying relevant and protecting their brand reputation. Both of these are challenging in the absence of shoots, decreased sales, and hence marketing budgets, and a new crisis every day.
Brands need all the help they can get in order to strengthen their connection with their audiences. Let’s look at a recent example – Nielsen India has been providing excellent content about consumer behavior during COVID for various verticals including retail, FMCG, and more. One of the tools they use for this is Talkwalker – using our platform, they are able to find a correlation between real-life events and social chatter.
They were able to find that in the long term, people were talking about immunity rather than germs.
Insights like this from social listening help Nielsen and other clients provide more relevant information and also enables them to add value to their customer-base, leading to a stronger connection over time.
What are the tools Talkwalker is using for their brands & Agencies to optimize this communication? What are the other innovations by Talkwalker in this new normal?
At Talkwalker, we have a complete in-house set-up, powered by our proprietary AI technology. What we are trying to do now is to innovate at a fast pace to make it as easy as possible for our clients to extract relevant information.
Just before the COVID crisis, we launched Conversation Clusters – a user-friendly data visualization tool that helps users to instantly find meaningful trends, patterns, content and connections for any topic, no matter the volume of results. Thereafter, we partnered with Quora last month in order to provide coverage from the social network to our tool. Finally, we just acquired Nielsen Social, to provide better coverage to brands and agencies that work with us.
You recently partnered with Quora to expand your offerings, how does that help brands?
Over the last couple of years we’ve received an increasing number of enquiries on Quora data coverage, which was a driving force behind our decision to partner with Quora.
Talkwalker users will now be able to integrate the unique, long-form, user-generated content present in Quora data in their monitoring, and use our platform to:
• Identify the most effective micro-influencers
• Research niche audiences
• Leverage the most popular answers & questions for content ideation
India is one of Quora’s fastest-growing markets, and brands and agencies looking to leverage the audience at Quora will now be able to do so using our tool.
Digital consumption has grown in leaps and bounds during this crisis, your thoughts?
Digital is at the forefront of content consumption today. It is also the place where people express themselves in a totally unfiltered manner. This means that it’s a very rich and raw source of information that is a treasure trove for any marketer. Not only do you know how your customers feel about your products and services, you also get insights about the kind of influencers your audience resonates with or even product feedback. All of this information is already there online- as marketers, our job is simply to make sense of it and act accordingly.
