Market Intelligence Comes Out Of Beta

After a year in private beta, SocialRank Market Intelligence is ready for its public launch.

Market Intel is everything SocialRank already does, organizing your Twitter followers and giving you control of sorting and filtering them by location, interests, engagement, and influence.

Except now you can do that with any public Twitter account you want. Want to see Coca-Cola’s, eBay’s, or your competitor’s followers? That’s what Market Intel lets you do.

In this post, we’re going to roll up our sleeves and dig into Market Intel — what it is, how to use it, and why we think it’s going to change the way brands think about “social media strategy.”

SocialRank Market Intelligence for Twitter

Market Intel is very simple. Enter the handle you want to take over and, voila, it starts running. This handle could be one with over 10 million followers, or it could be your reclusive neighbor’s dog’s Twitter account. As long as the account is public and has more than 5 followers, it will run.

Once the account processes, you’ll have full access to followers of their account. You can do all the filtering, sorting, saving, and exporting you want.

Here are all of @Pepsi’s 2.8M followers, organized by Most Followed. For some strange reason, I’m really interested in finding only the followers who are based in New York, are verified accounts, and have the name Jimmy.

It turns out that the only verified Jimmy in New York that follows @Pepsi is none other than Jimmy Fallon. This search took me less than five seconds.

Obviously this is a silly application of our filtering and sorting, but it shows the insane granularity of the Market Intel product.

For more practical applications, imagine you are desperately in need of hiring a senior Python developer. In Market Intel, you could run accounts for the numerous tech companies (see example of @Github above) or blogs that an experienced developer might be following. A few minutes of sorting and filtering later, you now have a robust list of self-identified Python developers that you can reach out to or tailor your advertising to.

Alternatively, let’s say you’re a marketer at a major sports brand that’s launching a new flight of shoes. You might follow a similar line of logic and target ads at Knicks fans who like shoes.

This level of granularity lets you know exactly whom you’re ads are being targeted at, and why. Which frees up your creative team to actually, you know, create.

Comparing Accounts Filter

One of the new features we are releasing with the launch of Market Intel is the Account Comparison filter.

We saw a lot of beta testers exporting followers of multiple handles, hopping into Excel, and performing annoying VLookUp functions to compare the overlap and difference of accounts.

With the comparison filter, all of this is taken care of for you in-platform. We’ve visualized it for you because Venn diagrams are great.

The green overlap region selects followers that two handles share in common with each other. You can then filter through these followers even more specifically using the other various filters (Bio Keyword, Location, etc).

Of course, with a simple click on the corresponding circle, you can also select followers who either 1) follow another account but don’t follow you, or 2) follow you but not that other account.’

Use Cases

The possible use cases for Market Intel are wide and varied. We try our best to stay out of your way, so the platform remains very open-ended to allow for creativity.

Here are two ways we’ve seen Market Intel used:

1) Promoted Tweet campaigns with highly tailored audiences

In the beginning of 2014, Twitter released some updates to Paid Products. Now you can run an advertising campaign targeted to a specified list of email addresses and Twitter handles.

The catch is that if you want to do it well, you need to provide Twitter with those emails or handles. To compile these handles, as we mentioned earlier, some brands have been exporting followers on Twitter, running time-consuming Excel functions to clean up the list, and then feeding it back into Twitter’s Ads platform.

Our Account Comparison filter takes care of the Excel jiu jitsu in mere seconds. Now all you need to do is export the list back into your campaign.

We’re so confident that when done right Market Intel makes campaigns perform better that we are currently using it to promote the product’s public launch. We’ll report back on its performance in a future article.

2) Detailed demographic and psychographic research for agencies

What we’ve seen countless times are agencies using Market Intel in preparation to pitch a new potential client.

For example, one agency was pitching a well-known female-focused athletic brand. They decided to use Market Intel to run some research on the brand and the competitive landscape it occupies.

The agency weaved this data into their presentation, showing their deep knowledge of the brand. The presentation left a strong impression on the brand; the agency ultimately won the brand’s business.

SocialRank Market Intelligence for Instagram

While we are only releasing Market Intel for Twitter today, we are happy to also announce that Market Intel will be ready for Instagram very soon.

We are letting people begin requesting access as of today here. Beta access will begin very soon.

Where the Puck’s Headed (and Other Cliches)

We spend a lot of time speaking with marketers at big brands and agencies. Market Intel is the brainchild of all of these conversations we’ve had.

Digital marketing and social media teams (at both brands and agencies) are exasperated. They’ve been optimizing their content for sharing, posting it at all the right times, and building aggressive editorial schedules.

Yet at our meetings, we see stress and concern that this isn’t enough. The weekly metrics on engagement and conversion rates from click to buy don’t add up to the effort they’ve been putting in.

We’ve had an inkling that maybe this is because not enough time has been spent thinking about the who.

Who exactly are you trying to resonate with? Who’s already listening to you? Who’s already sharing your stuff with their audience?

Once brands can more accurately focus on the who, they can more excitedly work on the what- the part of their day that got them pumped up in the first place about their line of work. Market Intel speeds up this process and makes it more effective.

Darren Herman, VP at Mozilla, wrote a piece several months back that echoed a similar sentiment. As technology makes marketing spend more targeted and more effective, Herman wrote, the creative part of this business will flourish:

I saw the future and it isn’t in media buying.

I saw the future and it is in media.

I saw the future and it is in creative.

This is a big day for us. We are excited to get Market Intel out the door and into your hands. Take it out for a test ride and let us know if you have any questions.

If you have any product feedback or suggestions — please don’t hesitate to hit us up at hi@socialrank.com — we really do listen!