Sotrender is a solution that helps you significantly improve your social media performance. Jan Zajac, the CEO of Sotrender, kindly agreed to the interview with Website Planet and provided some more information about the company, services, and plans for the future.
Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
It all started with our data science DNA and lessons learned in academia.
My two co-founders and I met while working on our Ph.D. in social sciences. We were building special technologies to gather and analyze human behavior online. Then we wanted to apply our skills in business. Our first company was a data engineering & consulting boutique. It was a great job, but difficult to scale, so we wanted to build a software company.
Our idea was to build analytical software for people who were not analysts but wanted to benefit from the data all the same. We wanted to make their lives easier by automating some of the more technical activities such as crunching data and generating reports. At the same time, we discovered that with the rapid growth of social media marketing there was often a lack of precise data to evaluate these activities. That’s when we got the idea and it all began.
What services do you offer?
We offer precise analytics, reporting, and competitive intelligence for social media communication of brands, government institutions, and NGOs. It is possible thanks to our SaaS product and our team of highly competent data scientists and analysts. Our clients can choose to do their own analyses using the product, and in special situations, our team can prepare bespoke reports for them.
Using our artificial intelligence models, we can prepare specialized reports that can answer more questions than your run-of-the-mill analytics tool. For example, you can learn what is the current social sentiment of your company across several online platforms. On the other hand, maybe you think your campaigns haven’t featured your brand enough, so we can analyze how often your logo appeared in ads or other video clips with logotype detection.
Who are your typical customers, and what do you think is the main challenge that your product solves for them?
Our clients mostly consist of mid-market brands, primarily B2C e-commerce. We also work with marketing and PR agencies, public, and government institutions.
As for their biggest challenge, I would say it’s understanding the real value of social media marketing and communication. There is also the challenge of learning how to compare themselves with the rest of the market and their respective industry benchmarks. Our application and reports help them understand how important social media is in meeting their business goals.
Which trends and technologies do you find to be particularly intriguing these days?
Definitely AI, especially when it comes to processing text and images! It’s fascinating how useful it is when processing large amounts of data. It also gives us the opportunity to automate the really mundane marketing tasks so that marketers have time to focus on more creative parts of their job. If something can be automated to save you time and can learn to become as accurate at recognizing images and texts as a person, I think it’s definitely worth exploring!
How has COVID impacted your customers and business?
There has been a small decline in the period of shock and uncertainty in March and April 2020. Consequently, things started to oscillate, first slowly, then faster. In the past months, we have been growing nicely, as most of the martech companies have. It’s not surprising, since companies are investing more and more into digital channels.
What are the plans for Sotrender for the near future?
We want to offer comprehensive reporting and analytics of social channels, so we are extending our offer of analytics and reporting for paid communication on Facebook and Instagram. This analysis would also include industry-level competitive benchmarking, and will be truly unique because it’s enabled by our proprietary machine learning models!
We already automated a Junior Analyst’s job, and in the grand scheme of things, our plan is to automate the role of the Head of Social Media or a Senior Strategist. That will be possible soon thanks to AI!
