While claims surrounding the credibility of Newt Gingrich’s online followers are beginning to make noise in Washington and beyond, the team at PeekYou, a New York based search company, identified the large gap between perception and reality last week during a testing session for its soon-to-launch PeekAnalytics. The discovery was made while compiling a ‘Followers Report’ on all of the GOP 2012 candidates.
The Consumer Ratio measures the percentage of a Twitter audience that is identified as a “consumer” or “voter” in Newt’s case, vs business, private/anonymous and spam accounts. The average range sits anywhere between 30-60% human depending on this type of account. Newt’s was 8% — the lowest the team had ever seen by 5%.
“We have seen some pretty low ‘Consumer Ratios’ in our testing, but Newt Gingrich’s was the lowest we had ever seen. At first, we actually thought it might have been a bug on our side, but a quick manual look at the data showed our analysis was true,” said Michael Hussey, CEO and founder of PeekYou.
“Once the news broke yesterday the team went back to look at the report. The data supported that out of Newt’s 1.3 million followers only 8 percent (2 percent less than claimed in recent media reports), are identified by our algorithm as humans, meaning Newt’s follower count is really closer to 106,055,” continued Hussey.
When assessing those approximately 100,000 followers via PeekAnalytics, the company established that 67% are male, 41% are over 35 years old, and 61% have less than 100 online connections. Using normalized population data, the top 5 states for legitimate followers are Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. In addition, more than the majority write a blog (typically supporting press/blogger interest) and favor Facebook as their social network of choice.
PeekAnalytics Follower Reports
So what is a ‘Follower Report’? For brands, politicians, anyone (anyone, really) it’s a way to understand ones current audience on Twitter and track gains in your consumer ratio, consumer reach or target market.
PeekYou identifies the “consumer” or in Newt’s case “voters” by using algorithms that PeekYou has developed over the past five years. “It’s determined by over 20 factors including name, location, social graph, social memberships, social network, social activity and produced public content. The issue is separating out the spam bots and anonymous accounts which can look a lot like each other; so its hard for everyone, including Twitter, to weed out the fake accounts,” said Josh Mackey, GM of Product.
PeekAnalytics is currently creating a case study on the effectiveness or ROI on various follower acquisition strategies and plans to release the results shortly.
About PeekAnalytics
Peek Analytics delivers enterprise-class Social Audience Measurement solutions that provide rich consumer insights to marketers. Its powerful yet simple audience metrics lets users understand the makeup of their social consumer base and track gains for specific target segments.
About Follower Report
The Follower Report product is part of the soon to be launched PeekAnalytics tool set that uses PeekYou’s proprietary search technology to analyze each and every followers’ public digital footprints. It then aggregates and anonymizes the data to return a complete cross platform view of the Audience.
About PeekYou
PeekYou is a search company that is indexing the public web around people’s identities, and redefining what it means to look someone up online. Rather than matching together mutually relevant URLs and keywords, as Google does, PeekYou matches any given URL to the identity of the person who created it, or whom it is about. To date, PeekYou has identified over 250 million people as the authors of over 3 billion public URLs. Over 7 million unique visitors use PeekYou’s people search engine every month. As of August 1, 2011, http://www.peekyou.com was ranked the 292nd most popular website in the U.S., according to Quantcast.