“Luxembourg is a beautiful country! Look at that sunshine!” Irina Novoselsky said in the office of Talkwalker CEO  in Kirchberg on Monday morning. Having arrived in the grand duchy at the end of last week, Novoselsky has come to meet the team, officials and media in Luxembourg, and to explain in a little more detail what she, the CEO of Hootsuite, has in mind for the local operation.

“Five billion people spend three hours a day on social networks, and the younger generation has no desire to go anywhere else to buy anything! Companies therefore need to be present and know how to extract the right information from social networks”, the New Yorker asserted. She herself spends almost ten hours a day on social, she said. “Social media management represents a largely untapped and growing global market opportunity worth $28bn.” The revenues of Hootsuite, by far the market leader, are in the region of $400m, with 6,000 companies and 200,000 people as customers.

Seven years after the start of a partnership between the company she has been running for the past year and the Luxembourg outfit, Talkwalker’s potential traction, technology and team convinced Hootsuite’s shareholders to take the plunge. Given the timing, was it this prospect that prompted Talkwalker’s management to cut staff in two phases, including one last February? No, say both CEOs. But rather the need to be on a sound footing to continue to develop.

While the exact place that Hootsuite’s Luxembourg entity will play within the company has not been defined, as in the space sector, for example, where American companies make Luxembourg their European headquarters, Novoselsky has left the door open to new recruitment depending on the company's needs, mentioning investments without defining them. The firms did not disclose the value of the acquisition, the company’s annual results or its profits. Singh said it was €80m to €90m in the . Based on its latest annual results, we calculated it at €50m to €60m, which Singh did not contradict when that figure was put forward to him. “Talkwalker has become profitable,” he stated.

Novoselsky confirmed that Hootsuite has bought 100% of the shares in the Luxembourg company, but Novoselsky--a mergers and acquisitions expert, who began her career at the investment bank Morgan Stanley in New York in the mid-2000s--explained that she still has everyone on board in a new share swap, including the three Luxembourg founders (Thibaut Britz, Christophe Folschette and ), the VCs from Marlin Capital Partners and the management.

In addition to Talkwalker’s products and staff, the Luxembourg-based company has another ‘weapon’, its Blue Silk AI technology, with 3bn data points to feed the artificial intelligence model, which frees up 40% of the time for customer teams every week and is available in 192 languages, analysing messages on social networks, videos, photos and even sounds.

“We know why people follow, engage, buy and break up with certain companies on social networks”, said Hootsuite's most spectacular campaign recently, which almost pre-empted the release of Beyoncé's country album:

- “75% of people who follow brands on social networks explicitly intend to buy from them;

- 68% of people have abandoned/hidden a brand in the last 12 months for posting boring content;

- 65% of people say they are more likely to follow brands that publish relevant and authentic content on social networks.”

Originally published in French by and translated for Delano