Social Media Analytics: New Social Snap Features Uncover the People Behind the Buzz

One of my frustrations with brand monitoring data is that it often leaves me with more questions than I started with — particularly questions about who is talking (a customer, a prospect, an opinion leader?) and what happened as a result.  If plowing through a sea of brand mentions makes you cranky too, we think you’ll like some new features we’ve just rolled out in Social Snap.

First, a little background:  Whenever a brand is mentioned, Social Snap captures the available data about the author of the mention and subsequently scores that author using a proprietary Influencer algorithm.  Scoring is based on more than just network size.  It includes numerous criteria, including whether and to what extent the person has mentioned the brand before, has mentioned a competitor, or has mentioned topics related to the product or brand category.  When viewing buzz data, Snap users can filter buzz records by the top 100 people listed in the Influencer database or, alternatively, by a subset of Influencers that are of particular interest.  Records can be further sorted by source (only Facebook, only Twitter, a single forum of particular interest, etc.)

In our newest release, the Snap system goes even further to tie buzz records and Influencer profiles together, providing some handy new features for our users:

1.) Quickly access information about the person behind the buzz: The first question that comes to mind when viewing a glowing (or critical) brand mention is always “who said that?”  We’ve now linked the audience profile record to the buzz record, making it much simpler to access information about the author while viewing buzz data.  Simply clicking on the person’s name in the buzz record loads the profile, which includes critical information about the person’s following, brand mentions, competitor mentions, and Influencer score. (It also includes any information added to the audience profile by the user, such as whether this person is on the house email list or connected to the brand in other ways.)

2.) View sharing data for each mention: It’s one thing to know that your brand was mentioned.  But what happened after that?  Was it shared?  Was it passed along?  Social Snap now enables the user to view sharing data within each individual buzz record.  The images below shows a brand post made by Social Snap to our Facebook page (buzz by the brand is included in monitoring data but can be filtered out).  All of the relevant sharing data for this post is shown within the data record (likes, shares, comments).  Clicking on the “likes” button loads a list of people who liked, each with corresponding audience profiles (like the one in the image above). In addition, expanding the “Insights” button displays all data about this post that Facebook Insights provides.

What do you think about these features?  Are they useful?  What else would you like to see?  Stay tuned for more new features to be announced in the next few weeks!