This is part of a series of posts based on excerpts from The Realtime Report’s Guide to Influence Measurement Tools.
Personal influence measurement tools such as Klout and PeerIndex attempt to measure the potential for a social network user to get other users to react to his or her content. But even if it is possible to measure this accurately, it tells you nothing about the size and the demographics audience that a particular influencer is reaching. Let’s say you could somehow convince the world’s top Klout influencer Justin Bieber to tweet about your product—would the thousands of re-tweets he is likely to generate really be valuable to you if Justin Bieber’s audience consists primarily of young girls, and your product is targeted to retirement-age men?
That’s where a tool like PeekAnalytics comes in. A new business analytics tool that was launched into beta in November 2011 and announced its official launch today, PeekAnalytics analyzes the audience of a given online influencer, and tells you what percentage of that audience can be identified as consumers with an identifiable online presence outside of Twitter. The tool then offers a detailed demographic and psychographic analysis of that audience.
The potential is so compelling that more than 2,500 brands and agencies signed on as beta customers, and the company today announced that big hitters Radian6, Big Fuel, Mashable, Nexalogy, and Media Profile are now on board as post-beta customers.
Using People Search to Fuel People Analytics
PeekAnalytics is based on data collected by PeekYou’s people search technology. PeekYou searches all publicly-available data—blogs, web sites, public records, social media and more. It creates a profile any time it can identify someone as a consumer, “a real person, in the real world, with a real name and city level location using publicly available data,” according to PeekAnalytics General Manager Josh Mackey. PeekYou CEO Michael Hussey says that his vision is to “index the web around people.”
Once it has identified an individual user online, PeekYou attempts to connect other content about that user to the same profile. The company has applied for a patent for a method that matches people’s real names to the pseudonyms they use on blogs, Twitter and other social networks.
250 million of these profiles are currently available on the PeekYou site, which functions as a consumer-facing, advertising-driven web site. Just as Google generates search results for keywords, PeekYou generates search results around people. The site has rapidly grown into a top-250 US web site based on the traffic it draws to its people search results.
If you’d like to see how much information about you is available online, this is the place to go. And get ready to be shocked—I was. PeekYou exposes all publicly available data about you. Depending on your perspective, having it exposed in this way is either a major violation of privacy, or a great service that PeekYou is providing to help you better manage your online data.
That said, PeekYou is very proactive about addressing user privacy concerns. There is an easy-to-find opt-out link, and a detailed privacy policy, including a Privacy Pledge, that is very transparent about what PeekYou does, and how they do it. The company also includes sections to help educate users about how various social networks share content about their users, and provides tips to help users manage their online reputation and privacy.
The PeekYou people database is the source of the data that PeekAnalytics uses to prepare its influencer audience reports.
Reach = Influence: How PeekAnalytics Calculates the Social Pull Score
PeekAnalytics is the business-to-business division of PeekYou, drawing on the company’s vast people database to provide detailed audience reports for online users. The tool is designed to help you understand the potential reach of a given influencer, in the same way that we measure audience size and demographics for traditional media such as print or broadcast.
The PeekAnalytics Social Follower Report analyzes a given user’s Twitter audience—defined as the user’s followers, and his or her followers’ followers, 2 degrees removed. It then takes that audience and cross-maps it to PeekYou’s people database to generate a detailed demographic analysis based on those users for which it has records. Twitter is the platform on which the initial audience size measurement is based—but the PeekAnalytics demographics reports go far beyond Twitter data.
The report first defines the size of a user’s audience. It tells you how many of the followers and followers’ followers can be identified as real people via the PeekYou database, and assigns a Social Pull score, which measures how large of an audience the user has compared to the average user.
Unlike the personal influence scores of the tools like Klout or Kred, the PeekAnalytics Social Pull score is very easy to interpret. The average profiled individual has a Social Pull of 1x. A 10x score means that the user has a “pull” that’s ten times higher than average.
There is no upper limit to the score, which measures “an audience’s transparency, level of social participation and their total consumer reach, as compared to the average social audience. In calculating a Pull score, we value quality above mere quantity and include active and passive audience members. The more transparent, active and connected the audience, the larger the Social Pull,” according to the platform’s web site. Transparency, in this case, means whether the audience members can be identified as real users within the PeekYou database.
Analyzing the Demographics of an Influencer’s Audience
The PeekAnalytics Audience Report then looks at the segment of the audience for which it has profiles to create a demographic analysis of the influencer’s audience. At this point, the report cross-references data from across 60 different social networks and blogs. First, PeekAnalytics reports the average network size of the user’s audience—the number of people that each of the user’s fans and followers can potentially reach. The report then offers detailed analysis in a number of areas:
- Audience Social Insights: how likely is the user’s audience to be active on various social media platforms? (PeekYou does not index profiles set to private.) How likely are they to be bloggers, podcasters, bookmarkers or users of geo-location tools?
- Audience Demographic Insights: Gender, Age, and Age by Gender
- Audience Geographic Insights: top cities, states and countries
- Audience Interests
- Audience Education
- Audience Income and Industry
PeekYou CEO Michael Hussey says that the company’s goal is to position PeekAnalytics to be “the Nielsen report for social media audiences.” More fun facts about the @RealtimeReport audience: our Twitter audience is 14x more likely to be heavy social media users, and 15x more likely to be into social bookmarking. 7% of our audience is based in New York; 4% in San Francisco. 20% are outside of the U.S. They’re 1.5x more likely to be interested in Business, 1.6x more likely to have attended an Ivy League school, 2.5x more likely to be working in the media industry, and 1.4x more likely to be earning more than $100K. Pretty cool, right?
It Gets Event Better: What’s That Hashtag’s Audience?
In addition to running audience reports for a Twitter account’s followers, PeekAnalytics also lets you set up reports to analyze the audience tied to a keyword mention, hashtags, URL or @username mentions. Want to know how #Yankees fans compare to #RedSox fans? Or maybe #Obama vs #Romney? Now you can. The company plans to add analytics for other popular social platforms later this year.
PeekYou is launching with a freemium model, with pricing based on the number of followers being tracked. Accounts with up to 20,000 followers can run reports for free; pricing for more than that start at $200 a month.
What do you think? How would your brand or clients use these analytics?
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To learn more about influence measurement and best practices in influencer marketing, check out The Realtime Report’s Guide to Influence Measurement Tools, our detailed analysis of personal and contextual influence measurement tools.
