Meltwater Announces Agreement to Acquire Social Media Intelligence Company Linkfluence

By AIT Staff Writer On Mar 16, 2021

Online media monitoring Meltwater has entered an agreement to acquire Linkfluence, a french SaaS company that uses Artificial Intelligence to algorithmically mine social media for consumer insights. The agreement is part of Meltwater’s growth strategy, which involves investments and acquisitions in the social media segment. The acquisition has been board approved by both companies and remains subject to completion of the information consultation process of the Linkfluence employees’ committee, as well as other customary conditions to closing. The transaction is expected to close by May 2021. Since 2016, Meltwater has had nine acquisitions including Linkfluence and the first since the company was listed on Euronext Growth Oslo in December 2020.

For the full year 2020, Linkfluence reached a revenue of 17 million euros. Excluding earn-out, Meltwater has agreed to purchase Linkfluence for a price of 2 times 2020 revenue, to be settled 50% in cash and 50% in new shares to be issued by Meltwater at a volume-weighted average price to be determined prior to closing. Since its inception in 2006, the company has expanded its winds to international territories with 150 employees across seven offices, headquartered in Paris. Its client’s list includes industry-leading brands such as LVMH, Nike, Danone, Pernod Ricard, Toyota, and Epic Games.

“Market research is a 73 billion-dollar industry which historically has relied heavily on manual labor. We have been impressed with Linkfluence’s deep client relationships with some of the world’s most demanding brands and its pioneering work in using smart algorithms and social media to automate market research. By combining Linkfluence’s award-winning SaaS solutions and expertise within market research and Meltwater’s global reach with 50 sales offices on 6 continents, we will be well-positioned to be the driving force of automating the multi-billion dollar market research industry,” says John Box, CEO of Meltwater.

Brands use Linkfluence’s SaaS solutions in order to identify and understand consumer groups online, to detect and track patterns and/or analysis of customer experience, to see how customers are linked with certain topics and values. Linkfluence’s technology analyzes billions of pages of public content on the Web using computer vision or natural language processing and structures the information into actionable insights that can be processed in real-time and on-demand by its clients. Linkfluence allows brands to take better and customer-centered decisions in every phase of their life cycles by offering an organizational structure that is scalable to globalized companies.

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“Given Meltwater’s sophisticated technology platform Fairhair.ai and our global reach, we are uniquely positioned to integrate best-of-class companies in key social use cases into a comprehensive social enterprise suite. Market research is one of the largest and most interesting opportunities within the social space. With Linkfluence’s industry-leading SaaS solution in AI-enabled consumer insights, Meltwater will add a complementary and strategic solution to its current social suite which will benefit our 28,000 customers globally,” says John Box.

Social Media Analytics refers to the method of gathering and analyzing the data for business decisions from websites and blogs in social media. It goes beyond the normal tracking or fundamental study of retweets or ‘likes’ to produce a deeper idea of the social user.

The analytics part further divides into social media intelligence and social media listening. Social intelligence is the stack of solutions and approaches used for social media tracking, including interactions and new trends. This intelligence is analyzed and used in many fields to produce useful content and to make business decisions. Social media listening is one of the most common misleading terms for the analysis of social media. It refers to one particular element of social media analysis. i.e. learning about your audience.