Streamline Your Social Media Management Efforts with NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is a social media management and customer engagement platform that has become an indispensable tool for businesses seeking to streamline their social media marketing efforts. With its powerful suite of features, including social media analytics, publishing, and customer service tools, NapoleonCat helps businesses manage their online presence across various social media platforms. The platform’s popularity has grown rapidly, with over 45,000 users in more than 60 countries.

In this interview, we will speak with Grzegorz Berezowski, the Founder and CEO of NapoleonCat, to gain insights into the company’s journey, its current offerings, and its future plans

Please share the story behind NapoleonCat:  What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?

Before founding NapoleonCat, I worked at a digital marketing agency where I was responsible for the areas of strategy, analytics, and social media services. This was back in 2010, which were the early days of social media as a marketing tool, at least in Europe.

I led the team that built brand presence on Facebook, created content, and managed interactions on social media profiles for our customers. Then, measured and analyzed the effectiveness of those activities and reported to customers. It was a bit of a tedious job to do using only the interfaces of those social media platforms because back then, there were no tools or features supporting those business cases, such as analytics, reporting, and scheduling content.  I wanted those activities or jobs to be effective and profitable for us as an agency, while also ensuring the services we provided to our customers were most effective.

Since managing social media is almost like a 24-hour job, I was concerned that my team had to work in the evenings and during the weekends. It was time-consuming and engaging, which made it very costly because people’s time is the most valuable resource. Additionally, I wanted to spare them from having to do repetitive tasks, such as manually collecting data and creating graphs and PowerPoint presentations to send to customers every week to report on the progress.

I was looking for ways to optimize and make it easier for my team to work on those tasks and make it more enjoyable. This was basically the idea behind the creation of NapoleonCat, which first started as an internal agency tool. However, I quickly realized that this tool could also be used by other agencies and larger customers. So, I decided to start the product business and offer NapoleonCat as a standalone tool, mostly for marketing agencies at first.

Quickly, I realized that larger companies that have their internal marketing teams would also like to have tools like this to help them manage their social media presence more effectively, measure progress, and track their competitors. All those things that NapoleonCat does. So, the idea behind it was to make work easier for my people and to make it more effective for everyone.

How does NapoleonCat work? What are the main features, and what makes it unique?

NapoleonCat is a social media engagement and customer service platform that helps brands maximize engagement with their broad audiences through social media. We help brands create and distribute content across various social media platforms, moderate comments and direct messages, and do it all at scale. The success of your communication on social media is determined by how many people you engage with and the volume of those conversations. To effectively manage all those interactions, you need to respond quickly. When people engage with brands on social media, they expect a quick response and to be noticed. If you’re successful with your social media marketing activities, you’ll receive a high volume of messages, making it challenging to respond quickly to each one.

Our platform helps businesses handle this increasing volume of interactions by integrating multiple social media channels in one place. This integration allows you to distribute your content across Facebook, Google My Business, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms using one interface. We also have a social inbox that collects all the comments and messages from various sources in one place, allowing you to quickly respond to them. Additionally, our platform allows larger teams to work collectively on responding to messages and automates certain activities. For example, you can set automatic responses to frequently asked questions, automatically sift through spammy messages, or hide offensive messages. This automation helps you concentrate on those important messages and conversations, without manually going through all the clutter and spam that inevitably flows through to your social media inbox.

Social media platforms are not only places where people share pictures of cats and their children. They are now channels where people research products or services, get support, find answers to their questions, and expect their problems to be solved. Businesses need to change or modify their internal processes to accommodate these channels. They need to train not only their marketing teams but also their customer service teams to use social media platforms or give them tools to manage those channels without being bothered with the whole entourage of social media platforms.

NapoleonCat is not only used by marketing teams but also increasingly used by customer service teams in small businesses like online stores, banks, telcos, and insurance companies. These businesses have hundreds of people in their customer service teams that now service social media channels, and they use NapoleonCat to effectively manage their customer service cases.

If you could share one best practice about using social media to grow a business, what would it be?

I believe that the most important thing when using social media is to be authentic.  This advice applies not just to marketing and communication, but to building your brand more broadly. In social media, people expect a two-way conversation, not a one-sided message like during a Super Bowl commercial. Therefore, the conversation has to be natural. You don’t want to feel like you’re talking to a salesperson, but to a real person. Social media was designed for people to talk to each other, meet new people, reconnect with old friends, and discuss various topics. When companies use these platforms, they are expected to behave similarly. The most effective businesses on social media are those that adapt to this philosophy and have a natural conversation with their customers, speaking as people rather than as a brand.

With the advent of artificial intelligence and the sudden explosion of AI-generated content, it’s increasingly important for businesses to be authentic. While conversational bots and other AI tools can be useful, they can also be a threat if they flood social media with uniform, artificial content that lacks uniqueness. Authenticity will become even more crucial in the near future. As a business tool provider, we’re implementing features that automate certain tasks, including interactions. However, it’s crucial that we do so responsibly and not try to replace people with automatic tools. Instead, our goal is to help people have meaningful interactions and engagement while freeing up their time to focus on more important tasks.

How do you see social media evolving over the next 5 years…what do you hope to see?

I’ve already shared with you my concerns about what social media might become – an arena for AI-generated bots and avatars. However, I also hope that social media platforms will use their AI algorithms to sift through this artificially generated content and highlight the authentic content created by real humans. To some extent, I expect social media platforms to become like an arena where AI algorithms battle each other and humans navigate this battlefield.

Looking five years into the future for social media and technology is a long time, and the speed of technological development is increasing constantly. The time frame for predicting the future gets shorter every day, and we can’t predict how it will look in five years. The explosion of OpenAI and ChatGPT a few months ago turned the entire industry upside down. So, to be honest, I don’t have a concrete answer to your question about the next five years, other than the fact that social media will become even more important for businesses in terms of sales, after-sales, and other customer lifecycle stages.

Social media has been used as a branding and demand generation tool, but now we are entering an era of social commerce and live commerce, which is becoming increasingly important in certain industries. I expect this trend to grow even more, and in five years, it will be natural for all kinds of customer-facing businesses and industries to communicate with their customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle across various social media platforms. There are more social media platforms today than ever before, and businesses will need to integrate this entire ecosystem into one place, ideally a tool like NapoleonCat. They will have to rearrange their processes and adjust them to be able to track and follow their customers wherever they are in this ecosystem.

What can we expect to see from NapoleonCat in the future?

One thing we are focusing on at NapoleonCat is bringing more platforms on board, not only social media platforms but also channels like Apple Store or Google Play where people heavily interact with brands that have their apps listed. Until recently, these were mostly productivity apps or games, but now almost every retailer or brand has its own app. However, they are forgetting that their customers can voice their opinions on those app stores and play stores, and there are thousands of comments that are critical not just about the app but also about the brand itself. It is essential that companies integrate those channels into their broad customer experience processes. To do that, they also need tools that simplify the process because it becomes costly if they have to have people specializing in different platforms.

We are connecting more and more platforms and working on automating internal processes and activities within NapoleonCat to act as assistance to people that deal with those engagements and conversations. We have features that help them surface meaningful conversations they should focus on and handle all the easy or meaningless cases to manage the higher volume, using artificial intelligence as well. We are integrating with other marketing and customer service tools that our customers are already using, so they have a broader picture of who they are speaking with. It’s not just Mr. White on Twitter, but John Smith, who has purchased this and that in the past, and is an important customer of ours. We want to help our users integrate data from social media platforms with other data they have on their customers to help those people more effectively and increase the customer experience.

If a customer or the person interacting with the brand can find the answer to their question faster and find a solution to their problem faster, they are more satisfied with the interaction. This, in turn, leads to positive emotions toward the brand, making it more likely for the customer to buy or buy again, and say good words about the brand to their friends. At the end of the day, it all boils down to having more satisfied customers.