French-based Agorapulse has recently acquired social listening platform Mention to connect social media management with social intelligence, enhancing its service offerings for mid-market businesses operating in the digital economy.

The acquisition comes at a time when the cost of social media data is increasing, making thorough listening tools both more valuable and more expensive to operate. For Agorapulse, a bootstrapped company with nearly $24 million in annual recurring revenue and 185 employees worldwide, the purchase marks a significant expansion of its capabilities.

“The long-term vision for Mention is that social media and web listening is the twin brother or the twin sister of social media management,” explains Emeric Ernoult, co-founder and CEO of Agorapulse. “They’re already a strong match—but once fully merged, it’ll be a seamless, unified solution.”

The Rationale Behind the Acquisition

For Emeric, the acquisition of Mention represents the outcome of a years-long strategy to expand Agorapulse’s capabilities beyond social media management into the complementary field of social listening.

“I’ve been talking to Mention for two years. Initially, they were not ready, and suddenly it was a good time for them,” Emeric reveals. “We’ve been wanting to add social media and web listening to our suite of products for the past two or three years.”

The timing of the acquisition, completed in May, comes after Agorapulse had already begun developing its own social listening capabilities. However, Emeric recognized that Mention offered something superior to what they could build internally.

“We built our own social and web listening already in Agorapulse,” he explains. “However, the product is not as deep and as good as the one from Mention. So it made sense for us to merge the two tech.”

What specifically attracted Agorapulse to Mention was the quality of its data and the breadth of its coverage. Before finalizing the acquisition, Agorapulse commissioned a comparative review of major players in the social listening space.

“We asked a consulting company that specialized in listening and in social and web listening to do a comparative review of several companies, and Mention emerged as the frontrunner,” Emeric states. “We decided to go ahead because we were confident in the quality of their product and data set.”

Bridging Management and Listening

The acquisition addresses a key aspect of how businesses approach social media. While Agorapulse has specialized in helping companies manage their own social media presence, Mention provides the complementary ability to understand what others are saying across the digital environment.

“Social media management means having a presence on social media: YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook,” Emeric explains. “It can be simplified by giving users one place where everything’s happening.”

This management aspect helps businesses streamline their content publication, engagement, and analytics. But Emeric recognizes that’s only half the equation.

“Listening is different. Listening is not managing your own presence; it’s listening to what people say about whatever topics that are of interest to you,” he clarifies.

Through the acquisition, Agorapulse aims to deliver a full-featured platform that serves multiple critical use cases. The first is alerting brands about relevant conversations. “Who is looking for what I’m selling right now? Who in my city is looking for a Mexican restaurant? If I owned a Mexican restaurant in San Diego, I would listen to those potential customers,” Emeric illustrates.

The second key use case involves enabling brands to respond appropriately to mentions across the web. “You need to engage. You need to reply and apologize if you’ve made a mistake,” he explains.

Emeric also identifies a third use case, centered on market research and consumer insights, although he notes that this is typically more relevant for larger enterprises with dedicated research teams.

As Emeric notes, for Agorapulse’s target customers—mid-market companies with more than 100 employees—the combination of management and listening tools offers significant benefits. “Now they have a leading solution in terms of capability and value,” he asserts.

Rising Cost of Social Data and Integration Challenges

While the strategic benefits of combining these capabilities are clear, the practical implementation presents several challenges that Emeric openly acknowledges, such as the rising cost of data acquisition.

“There used to be a time, 10 years ago, when you could have access to everything for free. That time is over,” Emeric states. “The cost of data has been multiplied by 50 in the past five years, whether it’s Twitter or web data.”

This shift has created particular challenges for Mention’s business model, which had focused on smaller businesses with lower price points. “Mention had a very low price starting at $49 a month, which was a mistake business-wise because data has become very expensive in this world,” Emeric explains. “They kept the same price that they didn’t raise over the past five years.”

As a result, integrating Mention with Agorapulse will require not just technical alignment but also a business model adjustment. “We’ll need to evolve Mention’s pricing model to reflect the true cost of premium data, while helping existing customers transition where possible,” Emeric notes.

Beyond pricing considerations, the technical integration itself represents a major undertaking. “Changing a product offering, merging two techs, and proposing a unique platform that does everything the right way takes time,” he points out. “We’ve already planned for a full year to have this integration fully done and operational. For now, the systems are temporarily running in parallel with separate logins for each product.”

Despite these challenges, Emeric shares that the feedback from users has been encouraging. Social listening was “the number one requested feature” from Agorapulse customers.

AI Advancement and Development

As Agorapulse works through these integration challenges, Emeric has his sights set on how artificial intelligence will improve the combined platform. For him, the acquisition of Mention coincides with a broader technological shift that will change how businesses extract insights from social data.

“We are going through this tectonic shift of AI, which is absolutely incredible,” he says. “We’ve made so many changes in how we work as a company and provide value as a product.”

For the remainder of this year, Emeric’s primary focus is on AI development and building APIs and connectors to make Agorapulse and Mention fully interoperable with other business systems.

“We’re making Agora Pulse and Mention full API compliant and making our ecosystem totally open to every other ecosystem,” he explains. “Our full API will be ready by the end of August. And once the full API is done, we’re going to start building our own connectors to the ecosystems that we believe are the closest to ours.”

The vision for social listening goes beyond the current dashboard-focused approach to something more conversational and intuitive. “As of today, what you have in the tools is mostly dashboards,” Emeric notes. “The way I see that in the future is that you’ll still have dashboards, but it’s going to shrink and it’s going to be in many cases replaced by the ChatGPT-like interface.”

This AI-powered approach would allow users to ask natural language questions about their social media presence and get immediate insights. Users could ask, “Can you tell me if my brand is being mentioned more this month than last month?” and then follow up with “Why do you see patterns that explain why I mentioned more? Is this happening in some countries more than others?”

Agorapulse has already begun this development, having launched an MCP (Multimodal Communication Protocol) server two months ago. “MCP is basically an API for LLMs. It’s basically how you make your data and technology accessible to LLMs as you would do to a product with an API,” Emeric explains.

“With AI and MCPs that I just mentioned, our ability to get insights from our social and web data is going to be multiplied by 100,” he predicts. “It’s not just going to be funky graphs and bar charts that we don’t understand; it’s really going to be the insights.”

With the acquisition of Mention, Agorapulse aims to offer a solution that combines management and listening, powered by advanced AI capabilities.

“I’ve already lived two major changes – the web change in 1998-2000 and the mobile change in 2010. And now is the third one,” Emeric reflects. “I’m lucky, but this time I have money and people, which makes me very excited.”