How Facebook chose Frrole to help them grow in the Asia Pacific region
A new addition to the page where Facebook lists out all its Media Solutions Partners is Frrole, the second Asian company among the 36 marketing-related companies from across the globe.
Frrole is a social data-as-a-service company that mines deep insights from social conversations and makes them available via its data feeds and dashboard applications. The intelligence engine that powers the application has the ability to analyze hundreds of millions of universal data sets in real-time.
The company, founded by Amarpreet Kalkat, Nishith Sharma, and Abhishek Vaid, in 2012, is a B2B offering and currently has over 45 clients in India and South East Asia, including Twitter, Times Group, Snapdeal, India Today, Ten Sports, and Kolkata Knight Riders.
Facebook choosing this Bengaluru-based social analytics startup to help grow in the Asia Pacific region is a milestone. YourStory chats with Nishith to get a glimpse into their efforts behind the scenes.
YS: How did you crack this partnership?
Nishith: We met the Facebook team a few months ago, and showed them what we were doing with various media companies using Twitter data. This fell very much in the scheme of things Facebook was planning with the media companies, and we saw a synergy of working together.
What we've been doing for the last two years is analyzing Twitter data in real-time, and integrating the insights into TV shows and digital properties via our APIs. Facebook data can also serve similar use cases, either individually or combined with Twitter data, and that is what brought us to the discussion of partnering together.
Both parties realized that there is a lot of value for everybody involved. Customers (media companies) get more exhaustive insights, and we (Frrole) enhance our product offering, and acquire more customers, while Facebook expands its reach in the APAC (Asia Pacific) market.
YS: How will this partnership work for Facebook?
Nishith: If Facebook is talking to a client and sees that there is a need for some sort of analyzed data integration in a digital property owned by that client, Facebook introduces Frrole to that client. We try and understand the need and scope, and provides the solution to that customer that involves Facebook data based insights. Everybody gets happy.
YS: What is in it for you, besides the fact that it is Facebook?
Nishith: Frrole talks to a client who wants to build something using Facebook data. As Frrole is a partner of Facebook, it has access to the data needed and can operate on it to provide exactly what the client is looking for.
YS: Give an example of something you might do for Facebook?
Nishith: A marketer who wants to dissect Facebook conversations about its brand from various perspectives needs to develop a monitoring dashboard. The existing dashboards are either not deep enough for him, or don't display the kind of things he wants to see. In such cases, Frrole can help develop a custom dashboard, integrate analyzed Facebook (and Twitter) data into it and make it run perennially.
YS: What do you think made Frrole stand out?
Nishith: Firstly, we have been working on Twitter data for over two years doing very similar things that Facebook intends to do in this region. Secondly, we are the only player in the Asia Pacific with focus on social integration via flexible APIs, rather than providing rigid monitoring dashboards, which other social analytics players focus on. And of course, complex, deep intelligence is our numero uno priority, making us the ideal partner for a futuristic company like Facebook.
YS: What is your advice to other startups that aspire for such partnerships?
Nishith: Solve complex and tough problems. There are times when they look impossible, but that is the reason they have remained unsolved until now. The better your core product is the higher will be the probability of you succeeding in delivering value to your partners.