An Introduction to PeekAnalytics
The PeekAnalytics Social Audience Report was devised as a way for businesses and individuals to better utilize social media through more thoroughly understanding of whom exactly their social audience is comprised. PeekAnalytics collects data from over 60 social sites (using PeekYou’s own API) and millions of blogs, from all over the public web. Then by standardizing and analyzing this vast and disparate information, PeekAnalytics is able to map the digital footprints of an individual’s fans and followers, and provide actionable, data-driven insights. For users and platforms seeking to integrate individual level understanding and meaningful audience measurement, PeekAnalytics is the perfect tool.
The Social Audience Report
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To best illustrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the findings, we’ve decided to profile the most prominent of the GOP’s current crop of presidential hopefuls. These candidates have not been chosen so that we might comment on the viability of any of them as candidates. As this is a body of individuals who each find himself or herself with a relatively robust (to varying degrees) Twitter followership, using them enables us to show what the tool set offers.
Key Metrics
The top section of the Social Audience Report provides PeekAnalytics’ users with an at-a-glance overview of their fans and followers; including, what portion of their social audience consists of actual, verifiable individuals (Consumer Ratio), and to what degree those individuals are connected to, and wield influence within the greater social media sphere (Social Pull).
(Note: For the moment, these top-line metrics are addressing Twitter followers.)
Total Audience
The first thing established, right off the bat, is the overall size of the social audience in question. In this case, these are the raw Twitter follower totals for each of the GOP’s top presidential candidates.
Newt Gingrich: 1,370,386
Herman Cain: 168,171
Mitt Romney: 164,416
Michele Bachmann: 115,704
Rick Perry: 108,475
Ron Paul: 79,125
By an enormous margin, the candidate with the highest follower count is former speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. Far behind, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney find themselves in a statistical dead heat. Much closer behind that pair, Texas governor Rick Perry and Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann find themselves neck and neck. Veteran Texas congressman Ron Paul – generally regarded as a formidable online presence, and a notoriously capable internet fundraiser, but proving that Twitter is not his domain – comes up behind the pack.
If an individuals’ (or business’) chief concern in employing social media is begetting a perception of popularity, then a large audience number may satisfy in and of itself and no further analysis is required. But, in addition to the fact that the public (and surely the competition) is becoming more and more aware of the relative lack of purposeful information provided by simply a large follower number, it’s also no longer adequate.
The remaining top-line numbers get more granular, and provide more profound and ultimately usable insights.
Consumer Ratio
This is where the Social Audience Report really begins to reveal what makes PeekAnalytics special.
The Consumer Ratio is the ratio of verifiable, addressable users to non-verifiable. The “non” are identified in our reporting as falling under one of three broad categories: Private consumers (people with private settings, which PeekYou never indexes), businesses and other organizations (brands, corporate profiles, apps, charities, government agencies, etc.), and unidentified profiles (either not connected to a real-world identity in any way, or spam bots).
The Consumer Ratio tells PeekAnalytics’ users, in simple and straightforward numbers, what portion of their social audience consists of actual people, with verifiable online identities and footprints. Consumers, as we define them, are individuals with – to varying degrees for each, but unmistakably – a transparent online identity (name, location, age, etc.), whose online life is integrated with their offline reputation (who share career and school info, and the like), who produce public content (Tweets, status updates, comments, blog entries, etc.), and whose social media connections are also trusted and verified individuals. In the case of these reports, these ratios more accurately represent actual “voters” rather than “consumers,” but the idea remains precisely the same. This is the portion of the social audience of interest, as these are actual people who have chosen to follow a given individual (or candidate, or business, or band, or whatever), and this is the portion of the social audience with which PeekAnalytics is chiefly concerned.
The report provides two numbers for this metric, the first is the actual number of verified people represented within the follower count, and the second is of course what percentage of the overall follower count those verified individuals represent.
Newt Gingrich: 477,054 ↔ 34%
Herman Cain: 77,548 ↔ 46%
Mitt Romney: 76,002 ↔ 46%
Rick Perry: 51,402 ↔ 47%
Michele Bachmann: 50,418 ↔ 43%
Ron Paul: 34,845 ↔ 44%
In terms of the actual number of confirmed individuals represented in the above ratios, Speaker Gingrich still heavily leads the pack; even though only approximately one third of his followers are verifiable. This metric reflects a change in the make-up of Newt’s followership (despite the fact that he still has roughly 1.3 million followers, as he did earlier in the summer), as previously our reporting found his ratio somewhere close to 10%. We believe this gain is owed chiefly to two significant changes: 1) Twitter has significantly improved spam detection over the course of this year, and 2) by way of his slow but steady rise up the polling, Gingrich has been picking up confirmable consumers/voters in rather significant quantities.
In general, in terms of confirmed voters, things fall in line more or less as they do above in the overall follower counts. Cain and Romney remain paired off in more or less a tie, and not too far behind them Perry and Bachmann constitute a statistical pairing of their own. Congressman Paul, as above, comes up the rear to a relatively significant degree (although form a pure percentage standpoint he falls toward the bottom of the middle the pack).
Already, however, even if thus far the story is not a shocking one, we know a great deal more about the reach of these candidates than we ever would have by just glancing at their Twitter pages alone. That in and of itself is a story worth knowing. And, we’re just getting started.
Social Pull
With the knowledge of the actual size of an individual’s consumer audience, one is still left to ponder how influential those confirmed consumers are. We know the size of the audience of verifiable consumers, but what of their quality in terms of spreading a a message further? Who are these consumers reaching, and are these comsumers’ followers listening? Are these consumers influential? The Social Pull metric provides an even deeper, more accurate, and significant idea of who exactly is receiving a given social media message, and how far that message can potentially travel to those motivated to receive it. The metric conveys to how large an audience beyond the total number represented in the Consumer Ratio can an individual’s (or business’, or candidate’s) message spread. In short, if the Social Pull number is 10x, that means that the audience the individual in question could reach is at least ten times greater than the average person.
Rick Perry: 1082x
Newt Gingrich: 934x
Michele Bachmann: 526x
Mitt Romney: 404x
Herman Cain: 466x
Ron Paul: 184x
Suddenly things look a bit different. Governor Perry’s reach here is rather noteworthy, and significantly greater than his follower number alone would suggest, as his verifiable consumer count is comprised of a particularly influential bunch. Still, in terms of people being reached on Twitter – according to this, or any of these top line metrics – he is no match for Speaker Gingrich. With a verified consumer count already eight times that of the Texas governor, Gingrich’s roughly equivalent social pull number finds him head and shoulders, and rather dramatically, beyond Perry and all of his fellow candidates in this arena.
Deeper Metrics
The Social Audience Report allows PeekAnalytics users to view side by side comparisons between two different social media players. For this section, in order to explore some of the deeper and more detailed metrics the report provides, we’re going to compare some of the candidates paired off, side by side.
A great place to start seems to be comparing our GOP Twitter king with the gentleman still most often characterized in the mainstream media as the one most likely to get the nomination: Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.
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Demographic Insights
Statistically, the respective demographic make-ups of Romney’s and Gingrich’s followers are not all that radically different from one another. We’d not make it our business to speculate too much on why that is, but we do imagine that some reading this will not find this fact terribly surprising.
The most unexpected finding might be that nearly a full third of Newt’s verified consumers are female, whereas women only comprise slightly more than a quarter of Mitt’s. Their followers’ age breakdowns are much closer, with both candidates finding slightly half (55% in Newt’s case and 53% in Mitt’s) of their verified followers being age 35 or older. Mitt’s follower do, however, overall skew somewhat younger than Newt’s.
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Education & Career Insights
For a little contrast, while continuing to explore some of the deeper understandings of the people comprising the candidates’ social audiences, we’ve decided for this next insight to compare Texas’s current governor to one of the state’s best known congressmen.
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From a basic education and career standpoint, the most immediately noticeable item is that Dr. Paul has a number of Ivy League educated followers rather significantly exceeding the average; with 7% of his verified followers having graduated from one of those esteemed north eastern institutions (whereas this is the case with only 2% of Governor Perry’s). A significantly larger portion of the governor’s followers have graduated from community college, with 16% of his followers fitting that description, as opposed to 6% of the congressman’s.
Otherwise, the career and education backgrounds of their verified followers seem quite similar.
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Income Level
In addition to professions, the Career Insights section of the report provides an income breakdown of the consumer audience. With 31% of his audience earning $100k or more annually, Mitt Romney finds himself with the most prosperous followers of this group of candidates (percentage-wise). Ron Paul’s audience contains the smallest portion of top earners, with only 22% of his followers in the $100K+ bracket.
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Social Insights
This final group of insights we’ll touch upon in this entry are those which specifically and explicitly dig into the online lives and behaviors of the report’s verified consumers. For this section, we’re going to do a comparison of Congresswoman Bachmann, who was briefly a buzzed about frontrunner this summer (but whose recent poll numbers are rather humble), with Herman Cain, who is still for the moment polling as one of the current frontrunners.
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The first metric in this group is one bound to be of interest to many, as it shows the average size of the consumer audience’s own potential reach. In this case, Michele Bachmann’s fans/followers have an average potential reach of 3,191 people; nearly twice that of Herman Cain’s followers, who have a potential reach of 1,686 people. Both numbers fall short of the average.
In terms of network size, 84% of Herman Cain’s consumer audience has under 500 followers, whereas the same is true of 75% of Bachmann’s.
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The remainder of the social insights – which measure both to what other social networking sites the consumer audience belongs, and in what online activities they participate – find both Bachmann’s and Cain’s audiences behaving very similarly, falling below the average in most categories.
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We’ll leave this at this for now. But these are not by any means all of the insights the PeekAnalytics Social Audience Report provides. In the coming weeks we’ll be running additional pieces exploring the tool’s many and varied capabilities.