Sprinklr acquires Little Bird to find Twitter influencers

Little Bird's helps businesses find influencers in their field and follow those conversations

We tend to look at Twitter, for the most part, from the consumer perspective, including how they're using it and whether or not Twitter is able to keep them. That is importany, of course, but Twitter's real value is more likely on the enterprise side. Whether that's companies and brand being able to interact with its customers, or them getting access to the tremendous amount of data the company is accruing. 

Social media management platform Sprinklr announced on Thursday that it acquired Little Bird, a company that analyzes social data to deliver insights for smarter enterprise marketing. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Little Bird’s six person team will join Sprinklr as part of the acquisition, and the technology will be incorporated into Sprinklr's platform.

"As is the case with all of Sprinklr’s acquisitions, the technology that has been purchased will be rebuilt as part of Sprinklr’s codebase. That's a huge differentiator for Sprinklr and part of its efforts to create a unified platform," Ragy Thomas, CEO and Founder of Sprinklr, told me. 

Founded in 2011, Little Bird was founded on the idea of helping businesses to unlock the valuable information in complex social data and to helpe businesses identfiy top social media influencers.

The company's Influencer Marketing Platform helps its clients identify networks and communities on Twitter, as well as discover influential people and companies, to learn what's trending and what people are talking about. The platform is also able to discover the most relevant content through Twitter shares, so that clients can keep on track of what those influencers are talking about.

The company solves a big problem with building an influencer engagement strategy; according to data from eMarketer, marketing and communication professionals, 75 percent cite it as their biggest challenge, above keeping track of activity, measure progam performance and finding the right tactics. 

Its customers include Microsoft, Mozilla, Autodesk, HubSpot, IBM and Lynda.com.

"Little Bird’s technology will enhance Sprinklr’s audience insights, segmentation, advertising, and analytics capabilities as part of the only unified platform for enterprises to engage customers and manage their experience at scale," Thomas said. 

"The company’s technology will bring direct value to each customer-facing department as well, allowing marketers to find potential evangelists and reach them with highly relevant content or ads; care teams to surface experts that can, in turn, support a wider community of customers; and research teams to better understand what their most valued customers think about their product."

For Little Bird, becoming part of Sprinklr gives it a scale and audience it otherwise it would not have been able to reach Marshall Kirkpatrick, Co-Founder & Chairman of Little Bird, wrote in a blog post. 

"As Deloitte's John Hagel and others have noted, the purpose of the enterprise has traditionally been to operate at scale. With the rise of automation, however, linking together large networks of human beings to pass the fruits of repeatable labor through an enterprise scale organization is no longer a great competitive advantage. That’s not the kind of work that humans are better at than machines, anymore," he wrote. 

"Little Bird’s acquisition by Sprinklr will enable us to be part of a story of enterprises shifting toward scalable learning for competitive advantage: learning about their customers, learning about those who influence their customers, and learning about important conversations early, thanks to analysis of data."

"Over the last five years, Little Bird has cemented itself as a pioneer in influencer discovery and analysis. During this time, large companies have been using Little Bird to discover and analyze hundreds or thousands of thought leaders in any field, in minutes," said Thomas.

"But one of the biggest challenges the company faced was scaling the ease of acting on that data once it’s inside the enterprise. With Sprinklr, Little Bird can now help many more enterprises shift toward scalable learning for competitive advantage: learning about their customers, learning about those who influence their customers, and learning about important conversations early, thanks to analysis of data."

This is just the second acquisition for Sprinklr this year. It bought social media aggregation and display platform Postano from TigerLogic Corporation in February.  It's the company's eleventh acquisition overall.

Earlier this year, Sprinklr raised a $105 million round of funding, giving it a total of $228.5 million and a $1.8 billion valuation.

(Image source: getlittlebird.com)