
IN CLEAR FOCUS: Emeric Ernoult, the CEO of Agorapulse, discusses social media management. From pioneering the first social inbox to developing ROI tracking tools, Emeric shares insights on measuring social media effectiveness, leveraging employee advocacy, and achieving 4-10x reach through strategic content distribution. Learn how this bootstrapped company grew to $20M+ revenue, helping brands streamline multi-platform management while proving social media’s impact on bottom-line results.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS:
Emeric Ernoult: Knowing that Facebook is generating $20,000 of revenue a month is interesting, but it’s not going to help you get more of that revenue. If you are actually able to know what is actually generating this 20K, then you’re going to be able to start working on a strategy that does more of what works and less of what does not.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Social media has firmly established itself as an indispensable channel for brands to connect with their audiences. Yet, as platforms proliferate and consumer behaviours evolve, many organisations struggle to effectively manage their social media presence while demonstrating meaningful return on investment. Brands and agencies alike are challenged not only to create engaging content but to measure its impact and ultimately prove its value. Our guest today is an entrepreneur who’s dedicated his career to solving these challenges. Emeric Ernoult is the co-founder and CEO of Agorapulse, a social media management platform trusted by top brands worldwide. Under his leadership, Agorapulse has grown to over $20 million in revenue without external funding, and the platform is consistently ranked number one on software review sites such as G2, GetApp, and Capterra. Emeric pioneered several groundbreaking features in social media management, including the first-ever social media inbox and ROI tracking tools. His journey from business lawyer to tech entrepreneur offers valuable insights for anyone interested in the intersection of social media, marketing, and business growth. To discuss Agorapulse’s features, I’m delighted that Emeric is joining us today from Paris, France. Emeric, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!
Emeric Ernoult: Well, I’m the one delighted, Adrian. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Adrian Tennant: Well, you began your career as a business lawyer before becoming an entrepreneur. What inspired that transition, and how did it eventually lead you to founding Agorapulse?
Emeric Ernoult: Yeah, that’s a great question. Everybody asks me this. It’s obviously not very common for lawyers to quit their job and do something completely unrelated. I think I’ve always been entrepreneurial in my life. Even when I was young, I was a Boy Scout chief and I had to lead a bunch of young kids into amazing summer camps and make them memorable and everything. So I think leading has always been something I enjoy doing. I liked the lawyer life. It was a very interesting job, but it’s also a very challenging job. And there was always something missing for me, which is you give advice and you move on and you give another advice to another company and then you move on. You’re never part of a project unless the project of building the firm or building your own firm. And when I started looking at what kind of projects I want to have in my professional life, I kind of weighed building my own firm or building something else, like a business that’s supposed to sell a product and not service. And it felt like selling a product would be better for me in the long run because I would get freedom. When you sell service, you don’t have a lot of freedom because you have to sell your time. When you sell a product, you can get some level of freedom because you sell something that a company helps you build. And then you can, you know, ideally take a step back, which I’ve never done in 25 years. So it’s kind of a. wishful thinking. And it felt like building a product and a company would allow me to build value that I could, you know, sell or get the benefits or the dividends from, and again, get freedom. I never really got freedom because you work a ton, or whatever you do. And for the value, yeah, it has articulated into something in 2019, we did a secondary round, so I was able to sell a little bit of my shares and buy a house. So I’d say that from a wealth perspective, it’s been a good choice so far. There’s a lot of wealth embedded into the shares, but it’s not realized. It’s worth nothing for now.
Adrian Tennant: So you’re very rich on paper.
Emeric Ernoult: Yeah, I’m immensely rich on paper.
Adrian Tennant: Emeric, what is Agorapulse and how does it help organizations manage their social media presences?
Emeric Ernoult: Yeah, sure. It’s a social media management software. So it basically helps organizations and agencies to manage their social presence or their customer social presence is basically get everything incoming, all the comments, the direct messages, private messages, the reviews, the posts from fans and followers and so on and so forth from all social platforms gathered into one place so you can respond to all of them. hide the one you want and can hide, delete the one you want and can delete, and so on and so forth. So it’s managed that incoming flow of information and messages and questions and mentions when you’re doing social and web listening. It’s also posting content towards those different presence on whatever that is, Meta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Blue Sky very soon. LinkedIn, of course, having a meaningful presence in terms of content distribution. And finally, measuring if all of this is working and worth your time and investment. And that’s probably one of the areas where we are the most passionate about. We really want to make sure that we build a product that shows the value that people build when they’re spending time and money on social media. So we have a lot of ROI-oriented features that we are pretty obsessed about.
Adrian Tennant: Well, we’ll certainly talk about those. Now, for brand managers listening to our conversation, what are the main challenges you see them facing when managing their social media presence across multiple platforms?
Emeric Ernoult: I think the main challenge is it’s too little time to do too many things. When you look at what brands that are doing well on social media have done in the past couple of years, a company like HubSpot, for example, is a good example. What they’re doing is really, really good and really well done as they’re spreading their presence across many different avenues. It’s great. But when you’re on your own running social, even sometimes content for a company of, what, 20, 25, 50 people, and it’s really hard to replicate that. So the difficulty they have is to find the low-hanging fruits of dispersion without spreading themselves too thin. Because if you’re only on one platform, and that platform, let’s say, get banned from the US, like it almost happened to TikTok. If you’re only on one, it’s risky. It’s risky for many different reasons. It’s risky because it may disappear or it may go down. It’s also risky because the algorithm may change, your audience may be harder to reach. So basically, having a good spread of that content in terms of images, text, and videos is the right strategy. But when you’re on your own and you have a dozen to look at, that’s really challenging. So that is the challenge I see the most. And the second one that’s right behind is getting budget and more resources to do what you do, which means proving that what you do impacts the bottom line. That’s the second big challenge.
Adrian Tennant: In the time you’ve been leading Agorapulse, how has the role of social media within the broader marketing mix evolved, would you say, particularly for consumer brands?
Emeric Ernoult: Yeah, well, if I take the early, early days, when we started, it was all about gathering a lot of quote-unquote “fans.” And I remember when Agorapulse started in 2011, 2012, the whole game of this industry was all about providing brands with contests, promotions, sweepstakes, like games, so that people would like your page at the time. Now you follow the page, but at the time you liked the page and especially Facebook, mostly that was back then. And brands were investing a lot of money to grow an audience that really was, you know, not really meaningful in the end, but that number made them feel good. So that was the early days. I would say that stopped in 2015, 2016. And then it was all about engagement. How do we get more engagement? And now it’s really more about how does it fit into the broader marketing strategy and branding and positioning strategy. So if you get a lot of engagement, but you cannot prove that this is aligned and is building upon the overall marketing strategy and it helps the positioning and the messaging, helping the company and the brand going in the right places and your engagement probably won’t matter. So that in a very high-level summary, those are the three times that I’ve seen one after the other dominate the social media landscape.
Adrian Tennant: Many marketing and advertising agencies manage multiple client accounts across various social platforms. Emeric, how does Agorapulse help streamline this process?
Emeric Ernoult: Really, first and foremost, having everything in the same place is really number one. But one could argue that every decent social media platform out there is going to claim the same value, that everything is in the same place. I think one of the things we’ve done very effectively early on is that we build the best social inbox in the market. We invented the social inbox in 2014. So before us, everything that was coming to you from social was displayed in colons. I don’t know if you remember that time, but companies like Hootsuite or TweetDeck back then had colons, and you had to define one keyword per colon. So one direct message from that Facebook page is one colon. You have another set of direct messages from another Facebook page, that’s another colon. And then each colon had its own thing. But if you were managing 50 profiles and you wanted comments and DMs and this and that, then you ended up having hundreds of colons, which was absolutely unmanageable. When we looked at that in 2014, we said, this is silly. People are used to email. We used to treat incoming social content as an email inbox. So have them come in in a feed that’s basically one column, like your email inbox, and that’s chronologically displaying everything. And then you can filter that feed, say, I want to see the comments. I want to see the DMs. I want to see the reviews. I want to see the post, I want to see the mentions and decide what you want to see and handle like you would do with an email. Like, you know, I’ve seen this or I’ve handled this like a case management system, if you will. And that’s what we invented in 2014, 2015. By the way, I didn’t mention that we’re bootstrap. We never raise money. So the heavily funded company copied that invention because there was not really a way to patent this. So I did not patent it. And now everybody has some sort of a social inbox. But really, when you look closer, ours is far from the crowd. It’s really on top of everyone else. So that’s the one thing that makes us special. And the other thing that I started to work on two and a half years ago is that social ROI. Like, how do you measure ROI? How do you prove that this is bringing more than just likes and comments, that it’s also bringing website visits and conversions and video views and podcast subscriptions and so on and so forth? That is the other uniqueness. This one I patented, though, because when I saw that everybody else copied my first social inbox, I said, this one, innovation, I’m going to keep for myself.
Adrian Tennant: As regular listeners know, we love case studies on IN CLEAR FOCUS. So, Emeric, could you share a success story of how a brand or agency has used Agorapulse to positively impact its approach to social media management?
Emeric Ernoult: Yeah, of course. So we work with a company called Saint-Gobain in South America, and they sell equipment for builders, construction equipment. And in that particular case, they sell roof equipment, things to replace your roof, basically. And they sell that to professionals who are building roofs for people or repairing roofs for people. And they do a lot of video explainers on YouTube. So they explain, this is how you install it, this is how you seal it to the wall, this is how you protect it, yada, yada, yada. And they put links in those videos that are explaining how to use the product. And those links go directly to the e-commerce website when you can actually purchase the product. And by doing that, they were able to measure exactly how many clicks they got from YouTube and then how many out-to-carts, like how many purchases they got from YouTube directly. So I know a lot of brands that sell product that requires a little bit of explanation, like explainer videos, as a marketing strategy to get people to use the product better and get to know the product. And when you add the right links into that video that drive traffic back to your website and create e-commerce revenue, then you’re able to tie the marketing strategy that is about explaining how to use your product into revenue and direct results to your website. So that’s one example. We also have a company that sells apparels that have the logo of sports team, university sports team in the US, and they use X to distribute their new collection. So if they have a new sport team from a new university, they’re going to partner with the communities on X. And they generate up to $40,000 a month of sales directly from tweets. that are promoting those t-shirts and sweatshirts and caps and so on and so forth. And before using us, they knew that X was a good revenue generation tool for them. But thanks to the tools that we give them, they knew exactly which collection worked best, which tweets got the most revenue. So it went very granular into understanding what actually works. And I think that was a great example to demonstrate that knowing that Facebook is generating $20,000 of revenue a month is interesting, but it’s not going to help you get more of that revenue and to leverage Facebook more. If you are actually able to know what inside your Facebook strategy is actually generating this 20K and what is not, then you’re going to be able to start working on a strategy that does more of what works and less of what does not. And I think that’s the key with any kind of measurement. Think about your paid advertising budget, right? If you do Google ads and you do search marketing, not all your keywords are going to perform the same and not all your campaigns and countries and so on and so forth. So you need to have granular data to be able to stop this and do more of that. And that’s what we’re providing, basically. If you look at your analytics data as of today, what you’re going to see is Facebook did X for you and LinkedIn did Y for you. That’s all you’re going to get. And people need to go deeper into, okay, what inside my Facebook content Is it my DMs? Is it my comments? Is it my post? Which post is it? And so on and so forth. So that’s one of the things that’s really important. And one last example, it’s an e-commerce company, and they sell plant-based medication. It’s a very small business, by the way. That’s interesting how much money they make on Instagram. But the strategy they use is they never advertise on their social media organic posts. They provide value. They provide, again, they sell plant-based medicine. So they basically sell a solution to health issues. So what they do on their content, they talk about the health issues, how to diagnose it, how to not make mistakes in the diagnosis, where to be diagnosed. If you want to do it yourself, what can you do and what kind of knowledge do you need to know to be able to do the diagnosis yourself? How does that look like? And then they say there are many different ways you can be treated. Some of them are chemicals, but we don’t like them. And some of them are not. If you’re interested, let us know in the comments or send us a DM. And basically they use the comments and the DMs to be the conversational elements that are leading to the cell. So people who are affected by this disease or this sickness are actually helped by the content. And because the content is helpful, then you’re like, okay, tell me more. I’d like to know what’s your solution to this because I really learned a lot thanks to you and I want to know more. So using the social content as the giveaway, like the helpful, I’m only doing this to help you. I don’t want to sell you anything. If you want to learn more, just ping me. is a great driver for them. And I think they do like 10 to 12K a month on DMs, just on DMs alone. And something else they do is they use a lot of stories on Instagram to do that. So the Instagram story, as you know, is something you can reply to via DM and it’s in the DM that the sales conversation is happening. So that’s yet another example.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
![]() | Alan Barker: Hello, I’m Alan Barker, the author of “The Complete Copywriter: The Definitive Guide to Marketing with Words,” published by Kogan Page. I’ll show you how to exercise your creativity, generate powerful ideas, maintain reader attention, and bring your copy to life. You’ll also learn how to develop a coherent content strategy, how to survive as a copywriter, and how to nurture a satisfying career. Whether you’re a professional writer already, a brand manager, or someone who creates content as part of another kind of job, this book will help you to develop the skills to craft compelling, customer-focused copy. As a listener to IN CLEAR FOCUS, you can save 25 percent on “The Complete Copywriter” when you order directly from Kogan Page. Just enter the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25 at the checkout. Shipping is always complimentary for customers in the US and UK. I hope my book helps you to become a more versatile, effective, and confident copywriter. Thank you! |
Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Emeric Ernoult, co-founder and CEO of Agorapulse. Emeric, one of the biggest challenges marketers face is demonstrating return on investment from social media activities. How does Agorapulse help calculate ROI?
Emeric Ernoult: Well, you know, it’s not rocket science. It is rocket science because I filed a patent for it! But it’s not rocket science. Basically, we use an existing analytics framework, which is Google Analytics, that 80 percent of businesses use in the world. We chose this one because it’s the most widespread one, obviously. We could connect with others, but this one is the one that allowed us to touch the wider market. We have a connection to Google Analytics. And basically, what we know from our side, we know who published what, at what time, on what network, and what content was included. Was it a video, a text, an image, a combination, anything? So we have all of the information of the context. when the post or the message or the private message or the direct message or comment or anything was posted because it’s done through us. So we have all this breadth of information. And on analytics, they have all that’s happened on the website once people landed on it. what page they landed on, what they did afterward, did they convert into anything, did they bounce back immediately, did they subscribe to a newsletter, did they watch the video, did they sign up for a free trial, whatever. GA has all this information and we have all the context of before. And our innovation was to connect the dots and be able to look at, okay, that person, how much revenue, this social profiles, not the social network, the social profile. Again, if you look at GA, you’re going to know that Facebook brought that much revenue. But if you look at us plus GA and our technology, you’re going to know what page specifically brought the revenue. So if you’re a franchisor and you have dozens and dozens of franchisees, you’re going to know which franchise is doing best on Facebook, not necessarily the whole Facebook for you. So that’s what it allows to do. It’s to go very granular in connecting the content type, the content author, the content type, the social profile, the type of content. Again, is it a direct message on Instagram or is it a comment on Facebook or is it a DM on X or is it a tweet on X or a piece of content on X? All of these, what are they doing once they land on the site? And obviously that requires that people put links that send traffic to their website. And it’s not every social engagement and interaction that has a link. But if you look at any social network today, you’re going to notice that one post out of three has a link in it. And that’s also our finding. We analyzed 10 million posts from our own platform and 34% had a link in it. So it’s not all of them, but it’s one-third, which is already quite significant. So for those one third, we are able to connect the dots.
Adrian Tennant: Agorapulse recently launched new advocacy features. Emeric, could you explain how brands can leverage advocacy in their social media strategy?
Emeric Ernoult: Yeah, absolutely. So there are two ways our advocacy features can help a brand. There is one way where a brand has posted something, usually on LinkedIn, and they want to defeat the algorithm. So they want to get more reach and engagement, and they ask their ecosystem to go and engage with that post. So please go like and comment and share my post and so on and so forth. So that’s one way. And the other way is like the brand has the message that they like people to spread in its own name. And basically the brand is going to send content with a link to their ecosystem and say, please, can you post this on your own profile? So On the one hand, you’ve posted something and you want your ecosystem to engage with it and to give it more strength and reach. And on the other hand, you want people to spread your message in their own name. So it’s like, those are the two different use cases. The first one, funny enough, came from our social media manager back in the day. She always was going to Slack and asking, can you go and engage with this post on LinkedIn to give it more power, please? We got this message like all day long. I said, we need to find a solution for that. This is very inefficient. So we build this for that. And also we heard a lot of people telling us they were doing the same thing, that they were asking their employees, their friends, their ambassadors, their influencer to go and share their own LinkedIn content. The second one really is more for the message to go further than your own followers. So if you’re a brand and you have a LinkedIn page or anything for that matter, that does not necessarily have to be on LinkedIn, but it’s mostly on LinkedIn. you’re going to be seen by your own followers unless in turn they share to their own followers, right? So that’s what you’re trying to achieve here is like you’re trying to get them to be the ones sharing the post and the content and not just you sharing the content to your own followers. What we’ve uncovered by doing this is that you get from four to ten times more reach when you do that than when you’re trying to always do it on your own. So our message to social media managers is don’t be on your own. leverage your community, leverage your best ambassadors, and usually your best ambassadors are your employees. That’s really where it’s easier to start. You can also have influencers that you work with. We have a a couple of dozens like that. You can have vendors that you work with, you know, franchisees, if you’re a franchisor. So it can go beyond employees, but your employees are really where to start. One use case I really like to share is that for HR purposes, for recruitment purposes, it’s a really, really effective way. The last two people we hired in our marketing team were hired through that process. Like they got to us through someone who shared our job opening on their own LinkedIn. So that’s very effective for that. Because if you’re hiring a developer, it’s much better to have all your developers share the job posting. Because if I share the job posting, it’s probably not going to get many because I don’t have a lot of developers friends. But my developers, they have plenty of developers friends. So it works really well. When you target the ask for the share to the right peeps in your team, then you got amazing results. So that’s the lowest hanging fruits of why people should use this kind of tool for their own business.
Adrian Tennant: You’re saying 4 to 10 times more?
Emeric Ernoult: 4 to 10x. 10x, yeah. Not 10 percent, 10x! And when you look at what people do, like the conversion once they land on the site, because we’ve also measured that, we were from 3 to 6x. So it was really, really effective in getting more people engaging with whatever content. If it’s a job posting, that’s 3 to 6 times more applicants to your job post. But when you think about it, it makes sense, right? Your employees. advertise for a job in their own team. And so the people who know them probably want to work with them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be friends, right? When you ask people to tell their friends that there is a room for them in their own team, the likelihood of them to at least raise their hand and say, hey, why not? I’ll check it out, is much more likely than you reaching out to strangers on LinkedIn or somewhere else who’ve never heard about you, don’t necessarily trust you and know you yet. So it’s quite an obvious thing to do.
Adrian Tennant: Now, I noted that Agorapulse already includes some AI tools built into the platform. I’m curious, Emeric, what’s on the product roadmap for the next couple of years?
Emeric Ernoult: So, when you think about AI in tools like ours, basically there are three areas. There’s the area of posting better content. For now, what we have is an AI co-pilot that helps you enhance, improve what you’ve already created, or you can just enter an idea and it’s going to turn that into a post. The next step of that is analyzing content, whether it’s your past content or your competition’s content, or any content from people you admire or you look up to that you gather into the tool, and that AI helps you pick the ones that make the most sense and resonate the most based on what you’re just like and what you’ve posted in the past. So that’s coming next. So that’s on the content production side. So help you create better content faster. That’s definitely what it’s going to do very soon. The second area is on help you respond. So that’s only for brands that have a lot of engagement on their profile or a lot of people messaging them or commenting on their posts. So it’s not for everyone, but for those. Sometimes there’s such an overwhelming amount of information that they need to analyze and understand and then reply to or hide or delete. That AI is definitely a great tool to start prioritizing or start, well, with this, I propose to delete. Do you agree? Yes. Yes. Basically, AI is going to help you go much faster through the flow of incoming comments and posts and messages. So that’s the second area of improvement. I would not advise to let AI entirely do that for you because sometimes it hallucinates and makes mistakes. So we probably want to keep an eye on that, but it will definitely make the job five, six times faster for sure. And the last one is analyze. OK, there’s this breadth of information. It’s everywhere. It’s overwhelming. What should I know that I’m not seeing? That’s like, how do I find the needle in the haystack in that information? And that’s definitely the third leg of how AI can help with social. Well, it could help with anything, but social in particular. has so much data and there’s so much content that if you have an AI copilot that’s basically analyzing it all and giving you the cream of the crop, like really what you need to know, that’s really helpful. So we’ve started implementing that on reporting. We’re also using that for analyzing sentiments across all the messages and fine-tuning that in all languages. So that’s the third block of why AI is going to really change the game in that space.
Adrian Tennant: Agorapulse runs multiple podcasts in different languages. How do you measure the effectiveness of your own content marketing efforts?
Emeric Ernoult: Yeah, that’s a great question. What you measure in that area is usually the tip of the iceberg. When you think about content marketing and especially about podcasts, it’s impossible to measure the whole iceberg. You cannot. The technology is not there and the ability is not there. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to measure the tip, not what’s underneath the surface. And, you know, some people who see the half-empty bottle are going to tell you, “Well, who cares about measuring the tip? Because everybody knows that the tip of the iceberg is very small compared to the whole iceberg.” But my position is quite different. I think measuring the tip is absolutely necessary because it gives you an idea of what’s under the surface. If you’re not measuring tips, there’s probably no freaking iceberg. So that’s for podcast. What we have is we have the podcast on various platforms, obviously, but we also have the podcast on our blog, and you can land on the page and listen to it on our blog. So what we do is we measure what we get, the amount of views we have on the page, the amount of listens we have there, and how many trials and demo requests we have that touch this before they do the free trial or a demo request. And we know it’s the tip of the iceberg. We know the number is small, but it’s telling us that this episode seems to resonate more than that one. So our podcasts are mostly vertical podcasts. We do one for agencies, one for hospitality, one for retail, and one for B2B right now. It also helps us to say which vertical is giving us the most engagement and the most trials. It’s still a tip, but it’s an insight. And it’s an insight we use to inform how much more that we want to do and what direction we want to go next. So it’s more that than proving that it’s worth doing. If you ask me, doing a podcast, I think is a great marketing initiative. And you should not request to see the exact dollar amount that your podcast is generating. You should look at engagement and consumption, number one, and retract consumption, of course. And you should look at those trailing indicator of what is working, even if it’s a tip of the podcast iceberg that you’re measuring.
Adrian Tennant: I love that. You characterized Agorapulse as boot-strapped. So, Emeric, what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs about bootstrapping versus seeking venture capital?
Emeric Ernoult: Yeah, before I give any advice, people need to realize that only 0.1 percent of companies raise money, if not less. It’s a very minimal number of companies that can have access to capital. So, if you are very passionate about launching a business, You don’t want to have 99.9 percent chance of failure, right? And that’s what you’re going to get if you aim for a VC. If you aim for a path that requires VC money to create a business. Because I tried to raise money for many years and I could never convince any venture capital to invest in us. So we failed at that. And so we had to go bootstrap, the bootstrap way. So my first advice is if you really want to start a business, try to build one in a way that does not require VC because otherwise your chances to win at creating a business are going to be very thin. The second thing I would say is that bootstrapping creates constraints and constraints are great for creativity and innovation. You remember I told you we invented the social media inbox? At a time where it made no sense, if we had raised money like everybody else back then, we probably would not have been forced to innovate and find something new because we had to be different. Because when you have not raised money, and everybody else around you has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, guess what? You have to be very different. You have to sound very different. If you sound like them, why would they choose you and you cost the same? Why would they choose you and not them, right? They would choose the safe bet. And the safe bet is the big, large company that you see everywhere because they have a ton of money. So that constraint is good for business because it forces you to innovate and be creative. And the last thing I would say is that there is an element of pride to not have raised money and have succeeded anyway, of course. but there’s also an element of freedom. And I see a lot of businesses that raise a ton of money and at some point they get into trouble, like the business is not so easy anymore and it’s bumpy. And what happens then is if your investors control your company and it’s bumpy and they’re not happy, you may not be in a very safe place. Or you may not be able to make the right decision. The decisions that you feel as a founder are the right one for your business. Being independent and having that independence is definitely your strength. If you still have the energy and the will to take your business further. So I think in this day and age, it’s a great way to start a business. It has a lot of downside. It’s hard. It takes longer. It’s more hard work, but you have to find the right partners. I was lucky enough to have a great co-founder who was a CTO and he knew how to build a product. Like you said, I’m an ex-lawyer. I knew nothing apart from law. I was very limited. So finding the right partners and finding the right kind of business that can be built with that right partner without funding is the key.
Adrian Tennant: Great advice and a great conversation. For listeners interested in learning more about your platform, Agorapulse, or connecting with you, what’s the best way to do so?
Emeric Ernoult: Well, the best way to connect with me is to connect with me on LinkedIn. Just mentioned that you heard me on a podcast that will help me say, okay, I know where you’re coming from because I get dozens of invites every day that I don’t accept because otherwise my LinkedIn would be a zoo. And the best way to learn about Agorapulse is to go on agorapulse.com, A-G-O-R-A-P-U-L-S-E.com and start a free trial. It doesn’t cost anything and you can really see what’s in it for you without no commitment.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Emeric, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Emeric Ernoult: Thank you, Adrian. Thank you for having me.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Emeric Ernoult, co-founder and CEO of Agorapulse. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Introduction to Social Media Management Challenges
02:15: Emeric Ernoult’s Journey from Lawyer to Entrepreneur
04:37: Overview of Agorapulse and Its Features
05:58: Challenges for Brand Managers in Social Media
07:27: Evolution of Social Media’s Role in Marketing
08:50: Streamlining Social Media Management for Agencies
11:08: Case Studies: Success Stories with Agorapulse
15:59: Measuring ROI from Social Media Activities
20:01: Leveraging Advocacy in Social Media Strategy
22:53: Future of AI in Social Media Management
26:24: Measuring Content Marketing Effectiveness
28:35: Advice on Bootstrapping vs. Seeking Venture Capital
31:27: Connecting with Emeric Ernoult and Agorapulse