How Agorapulse boosted productivity across the organization and optimized its tech stack with Twilio Segment

The big win

Agorapulse needed to offload the manual work of building ETL pipelines to better allocate engineering resources to priority initiatives. The goal was to remain cost-effective as a business, while still focusing on innovation.

With Twilio Segment, Agorapulse saves countless engineering hours. Integrations are set up easily, and when the company was migrating data warehouses, Twilio Segment was able to reload 4 years worth of data to get Agorapulse up and running in a few weeks. Agorapulse is now more strategically allocating engineering resources to focus on product development.

Agorapulse helps businesses manage their social media strategy across Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. The platform allows teams to collaborate cross-functionally, schedule posts in advance, and analyze comprehensive reports on audience engagement, brand discussions, and competitor performance. 

The idea for Agorapulse first took root in the early 2000s, with co-founders Emeric Ernoult and Benoit Hediard continuously iterating on their idea of making social media management easier for businesses. Headquartered in Paris, Agorapulse officially launched in 2011 and has steadily grown its customer base to more than 35,000 users across the globe.

Today, Agorapulse continues to balance its “bootstrap” mentality while staying committed to research & development. 

Building out a new customer data pipeline while staying cost-efficient

Rapid growth sounds like an obvious win for any business – but it comes with a catch. You have to be ready to scale operations. Agorapulse was in a growth phase, and was conscious of avoiding burnout across teams while keeping operations cost-efficient. 

Benoit Hediard, the company’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, was tasked with evaluating the technologies used within the organization to increase workflow efficiency. The goal was to maintain Agorapulse’s current growth while continuing to innovate on the product. 

Offloading the manual work and assuring data continuity with Twilio Segment

Agorapulse’s data engineering team plays a cross-functional role at the company. They work with product, marketing, sales, and customer support to ensure each team has clean data to gain actionable insights from. Democratizing this data was an opportunity to increase productivity across teams and redistribute engineering resources more strategically. 

With Twilio Segment, the data engineering team could offload the manual work of building ETL pipelines. This allowed engineers to focus on more complex tasks, like advanced data analysis, while giving every team at Agorapulse access to consolidated, real-time customer data. 

“Everything is easier with Twilio Segment. It’s much faster for us to build a data pipeline. You can just go to Twilio Segment’s integration catalog and select a Source or Destination, and if it isn't there, you can use custom Functions to create one.” - David Martins, Data Scientist, Agorapulse 

But one of the biggest advantages to using Twilio Segment was that it assured data continuity. When Agorapulse was switching data warehouses – migrating from Amazon Redshift to Google BigQuery – Twilio Segment was able to reload four years’ worth of data to get Agorapulse up and running in a few weeks. Without Twilio Segment, this process could have easily taken months to complete, and as David Martins noted, Twilio Segment eliminated any concern over human error, which could have delayed things further. 

The ease of reloading data with Twilio Segment has also helped Agorapulse more thoroughly assess new technologies before bringing them into their tech stack. Recently, Twilio Segment’s product team was able to reload six months worth of data into the product analytics platform Heap during Agorapulse’s two-week trial period. Having access to this data helped engineers evaluate Heap on a deeper level than just getting familiar with the product interface. And at the end of the two-week period, Agorapulse confidently moved forward with the Heap integration.  

Increasing productivity across teams to drive more growth

By using Twilio Segment, Agorapulse has been able to increase productivity across teams and continue to grow while keeping operations cost-effective. Specifically by: 

• Offloading the manual work of building integrations, so engineers can focus on more high-level tasks and advanced data analysis. 

• Completing a migration from Amazon Redshift to Google BigQuery in a few weeks (a process that otherwise would have taken months). 

• Easily integrating new platforms into its tech stack on a trial basis, to more thoroughly evaluate capabilities before committing to long-term contracts.