The Innotribe Startup Challenge has become established as a pre-eminent opportunity for fintech startups seeking a foothold in the complex world of financial services. This year’s ISC finale took place at Sibos 2015 Singapore. As I watched the event, voted on the startup pitches and tweeted my observations, I thought it might be interesting to see how taking part, and winning, was reflected on social media.
So I asked our Cognito Insights team to take a closer look at the chatter around the startups and to pull a few of charts from social listening tool Brandwatch. Full details below.
For the last six months, the vast majority of online brand mentions for the startups occured on Twitter, as evidenced in this first graph:
This second graph shows brand mentions per week for each of the twelve startup finalists.
Four things stand out:
- Overall brand mentions for the group are pretty low, reflecting the general B2B focus.
- Revolut has sustained preponderance in the group, reflecting probably its B2C focus, but also perhaps the intensity of its social media activity, with a spike around its fundraising in July.
- Bitspark had a spike in July when it joined Accenture’s incubator programme.
- Hyperledger, the winner of the Innotribe Startup Challenge, had two spikes, one in the summer around its acquisition by Blythe Masters’ Digital Asset Holdings, and one during Sibos around its win.
This is what was said about Hyperledger at the time of the Digital Assets Holdings acquisition.
And this word cloud illustrates the conversation key words around Hyperledger’s ISC win at Sibos:
For comparison, here is the mid-July conversation around Bitspark and their Accenture activity.
Finally, here’s the Revolut word cloud concerning its fundraising.
What’s striking about all the word clouds is that they are relatively “one topic” based. That’s natural for any startup. As companies grow, ideally what’s said about them at any given point will cover a range of pertinent topics and company messaging.
We also looked at the professions of those discussing the startups during the week of Sibos. The large number of “executive” mentions on the October 14th reflects the Sibos audience members – many of whom were live-tweeting from the finale.
These charts are simply the tip of the iceberg from a research perspective. But even a quick social listening dip can reveal useful nuggets of insight.
For more information about social listening, please get in touch with our Cognito Insights team – [email protected]
To learn more about the startups mentioned in this post, you can take a look at their Twitter handles:
- Bitspark – @BitsparkBTC
- iwiafrica – @iwiafrica
- Hyperledger – @Hyperledger
- Jewel Paymentech – @jewelpaymentech
- Notafy – @Notafy
- Pariti – @Pariti_finance
- Revolut – @RevolutApp
- Sedicii – @GBRSedicii
- SizeUp – @SizeUpBusiness
- Token – @token_io
- Trustingsocial – @Trustingsocial
- YueDiligence – @YueDiligence