Where SocialRank Is Going (Building In Public)
May was a big month for SocialRank. We had four major milestones.
1) We announced that we closed $1M to grow SocialRank.
2) We announced the ability to request early-access to SocialRank Market Intelligence, which gives brands the ability to run any handle on Twitter through the SocialRank platform to see that handle’s most engaged,valuable, and best followers. In June we will be letting select brands into the product.
3) We announced that over 5,000 brands have used SocialRank since our February launch.
4) We hired an awesome head of design, Zhanna. She is front-end developer and UX/UI designer who previously worked at Digital Ocean and Quirky.
So where is SocialRank going? That is a great question. To understand where we are going, we need to explain where we have come from. We purposefully launched a simple tool back in February to get brands using it. After all, it is just a list! A list of your followers, sorted by value (MVF), engagement (MEF), and a combo (BF). Heck we only show you your top 10 or top 100 if you are paid. Unless you are a self-starter (a bunch of brands are) there wasn’t much you could use the tool for besides coming back to see if you had new big followers.
But this is going to change very soon and for the better. We are now working on a new and (visually) improved SocialRank that should be released sometime the end of June/beginning of July that will show you all of your followers. Showing you all shouldn’t be a premium feature, it should be the basic offering. On top of that we will be including the most requested feature, deep filtering. We are working on that right now. Filtering will allow you to filter in and out things like Verified status, Location, Identity (celebrity, mommy blogger, etc.), Interests (Sports, Movies, Music, etc.), and more.
SocialRank will help brands slice and dice their followers, starting with Twitter but soon after Instagram. We are at the beginning stages of thinking about what we will be offering for Instagram. We would have done it sooner, but we took the feedback from brands and users in the past four months and decided to build the design and infrastructure to support any network first before adding the next social platform. We think each network is very different (for example: Instagram is visual with no linking — all dead links) and want to do each one right and not just have every network for the sake of having it.
SocialRank the product is going the direction of CRM for your followers on social media. Sprinkle in a little SocialRank Market Intelligence (running other handles) and you have one powerful tool.
I’ll leave you with a closer look at what is coming for SocialRank. Below is a design look at what is coming, as well as what a brand can theoretically do with SocialRank Market Intelligence.
The set-up: Imagine a movie studio like 20th Century Fox wanted to do better social research for a movie like X-Men: Days of Future Past (which was a pretty awesome movie). Fox only has access to @XMenMovies, but to get people into the theaters they should be doing things like targeting the followers of the stars in the movie. In this case, wouldn’t it be vital to know who engages with Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Stan Lee, Ellen Page, and others on Twitter? You can even take it a step further: why not check out who engages with @Marvel, other popular movies like Batman, Spiderman, Captain America, Superman. Run the biggest comic-book/superhero-related handles out there. The opportunities are endless. We are excited.
