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When Will My Company Outgrow Talkwalker? A Guide for Social Listening Products

By Tyler Logtenberg

Decemeber 2024 | 7 min. read

Table of Contents

Talkwalker Is An Ideal Initial Solution

For social listening products entering the market, Talkwalker’s APIs offer a foundational framework to bring the UI, familiar experience, and supporting APIs together. In the creation of other social listening products, these APIs become the source backbones of the platforms. Talkwalker’s APIs offer: multi-source data aggregation, basic enrichments, and an accessible taxonomy system.

Utilizing the APIs of another platform provides companies a way to integrate social and media data into their products, and leverage enrichment and search capabilities, without building a custom data pipeline from scratch. However, while Talkwalker meets the needs of many early-stage use cases, it’s often outgrown as companies mature and require greater flexibility, real-time data, and in-depth analysis capabilities.

Talkwalker’s API Capabilities: What It Can (And Can’t) Do For Scaling Companies

Before we can dive into an exploration of the “when”, we need to understand what it can and can’t do for scaling products. While Talkwalker provides basic social listening functionality, its constraints can become limiting as companies expand:

  1. Credit-Based Data Access: Talkwalker’s API operates on a credit-based system, meaning that data access is limited by credit availability. For high-frequency or high-volume data needs, companies may quickly hit credit limits, creating bottlenecks and additional costs as data needs grow.
  2. Rate Limits of 240 Calls per Minute: In the scaled industry, rate limits become a key technical limitation, and are often measured in calls per second. While Talkwalkers rate limits may be sufficient for basic monitoring, scaling platforms with higher volumes can quickly find these restrictive, especially during high-traffic events or crisis monitoring.
  3. Self-Managed Data Storage: Talkwalker doesn’t store API results, leaving companies responsible for their own data storage. This can become a significant burden for teams scaling beyond initial use cases, especially if they need both current and historical data at hand. Elements like trend prediction, influencer efforts, AI training, or even moderate analysis require large volumes of data.
  4. Export Limitations: Data export restrictions affect several key platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Additionally, metadata for Twitter and other sources is limited, often forcing companies to rely on separate APIs for richer insights. In some cases, the documentation of Talkwalker suggests going directly to different data sources outside of the Talkwalker platform!
  5. Limited Enrichments: Talkwalker does offer basic enrichments, including sentiment analysis, country filtering, basic image analysis, topics, and entity recognition. While these are helpful for early insights, they may fall short as companies seek more detailed or custom data tags, audience insights, or advanced sentiment scoring. They are also general enrichments common across the market, limiting scaling companies from creating product differentiation or customization.
  6. Time-Limited Search Results: The API’s search capabilities allow access only to the last 30 days of data, limiting long-term analysis and making it challenging to identify historical trends over time.
  7. Boolean Search Cap: With a cap of 50 boolean operands, Talkwalker’s search capabilities can be restrictive, especially for platforms seeking to conduct complex, multi-variable searches.

Key Indicators You’re Outgrowing Talkwalker

  1. Increasing Data Source Needs: Organizations may be able to work within Talkwalker’s source constraints, using around 6 categories of data, as startups. However, as companies move to the scale-up or growth stage, they often need access to a wider range of sources. Enterprise companies typically require access to about 16 source categories to meet comprehensive data coverage needs. For many, Talkwalker’s export limitations on major social media and review platforms restrict the breadth of insights they can provide, which becomes increasingly problematic with scale.

This table is specific to the Brand Monitoring industry focus, and showcases the size, requirements, and if they have outgrown Talkwalker. These metrics are an average and do not take into account pivots or niche specializations.

Company Size Bracket

Data Source Categories Required*

Likely Outgrown?*

Average Company Age*

0-50 (Startup)

6

No

1.8 years

51-150 (Scaler)

8

Yes

3.9 years

151-400 (Growth Leaders)

10

Yes

5.9 years

400+ (Market Titans)

16

Yes

8.8 years

*Specific to Brand Monitoring industry focus

  1. High Data Volume or Frequency Needs are Pushing Credit Limits: Companies with growing data needs often find themselves quickly depleting Talkwalker credits, particularly if they are pulling data from multiple sources or for multiple projects. For platforms needing continuous data access, credit limitations can create unplanned expenses or data gaps.
  2. Increasing Competitor Pressure: With many organizations relying on similar feature capabilities, the capabilities become commoditized between competitors. Increased competitor pressure, and churn, are often due to over-reliance on these commoditized capabilities.
  3. Loss of Engineering Product Focus: Talkwalker’s approach requires companies to handle their own data storage and management, which forces the technical teams of many organizations into considering and implementing “helper pipelines”. These efforts, which are not core to the offerings of the organizations, often cause spikes in engineering costs and delayed speed-to-market due to split focus.
  4. Need for Advanced Enrichment: As products mature, many require data enrichments beyond basic sentiment or topic identification. Companies that need granular sentiment analysis, detailed entity recognition, AI capabilities, or even custom enrichments may find Talkwalker’s offerings insufficient.
  5. Limited Historical Analysis: Talkwalker’s 30-day data window restricts long-term trend analysis, which is essential for companies needing to track patterns over months or years. If your platform is moving toward providing trend analytics, deeper insights, or historical comparisons, the API’s time limits could quickly become a constraint.

Migration: Paths for When Talkwalker no Longer Fits

For companies reaching the stage where Talkwalker’s API limitations are hindering product capabilities, the question becomes how to scale beyond it. Below are three common paths forward, from incremental shifts to full migrations.

  1. Hybrid Solution: Many companies take a gradual approach, retaining Talkwalker’s API for certain data sources while integrating a more flexible provider like Datastreamer for real-time or high-volume needs. Taking a “DIY” approach is a secondary option, but increases the need of “helper pipelines” which, if created and managed internally, can cause  “Pipeline Plateau” symptoms.
  2. Soft Upgrade: A phased approach allows companies to transition to a more advanced platform over time. By adding components from various parties into a Pipeline Orchestration Platform, companies can progressively migrate away from Talkwalker while minimizing disruptions and balancing resource requirements.

Full Upgrade: For mature platforms that have fully outgrown Talkwalker’s API limitations, a full upgrade to a new platform may be the best option. Moving entirely to a scalable, flexible Orchestration Platform like Datastreamer allows companies to bypass constraints such as rate limits and credit systems, while also gaining no-code abilities to add any enrichment, source, or capability required. This approach is ideal for companies needing a future-proof, high-powered data pipeline to support long-term growth.

Conclusion: Identify and Plan Migration before Product Stalling

Talkwalker provides a valuable entry point for companies launching social listening and media monitoring products, but its limitations often surface as companies scale and data needs evolve. From rate limits to export restrictions and limited enrichments, Talkwalker’s API can start to constrain the insights products that companies want to deliver.

In many cases, companies like Talkwalker use their own Pipeline Orchestration Platforms, and leveraging these underlying systems directly can be a massive benefit. 

Understanding limitations, identifying indicators, and beginning to plan and leverage migration is a critical step. It is important to avoid the “Pipeline Plateau” which may occur due to investing in-house capabilities in an effort to replicate Talkwalker capabilities. Leveraging a Data Orchestration Platform like Datastreamer is the correct decision to make.