Social intelligence company Brandwatch has acquired influencer identification platform BuzzSumo.

Brandwatch’s value proposition is providing socially-mined insights to marketers, and the strategic partnership will enable the company to deliver BuzzSumo’s content tracking expertise to a global client base.

BuzzSumo currently provides content discovery and performance analytics to around 3400 customers and over 300,000 users internationally.

Despite the acquisition, BuzzSumo will retain its branding and daily functions will continue running as normal. Brandwatch plans to use its own data and resources to enhance the platform’s trend identification, content discovery capabilities and content measurement.

According to Forrester Research, US companies spent $10 billion on content marketing in 2016, with separate research from CMI revealing marketers are

much more confident in their company’s content marketing approach

compared to a year ago. 

Giles Palmer (pictured above, left), CEO of Brandwatch, said: “Customer and market needs drive every decision we make at Brandwatch. BuzzSumo is a high-performing and high-growth tech firm that fills an important need in the marketing world. Bringing together our strengths at serving either end of the market while maintaining our brands will only bring more value to our customers.”

Steve Rayson (pictured above, right), director at BuzzSumo added: “We’re delighted to be joining a company that shares our values and aspirations. This is an exciting development which means we can leverage Brandwatch’s expertise, data and resources to improve BuzzSumo for our customers.”

Brandwatch has seen rapid growth in the past few years,

as a start-up it received a £1.5 million venture debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank in 2013.