Show HN: Tweeple Search – Find relevant audience and influencers on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tweeple Search – Find relevant audience and influencers on Twitter

tweeplesearch.com

62 pointsshuss24 comments

I worked on this exact same problem one summer, and it's a much harder problem than I anticipated. The makers of this would probably concur -- I haven't gotten great results, even using their suggested searches (e.g. "entrepreneur brings up Demi Lovato, Tiger Woods, and Pitbull).

There are both tweet-level and account-level signals. But some of those signals can be artificially inflated -- follower counts, favorites, etc. One of the highest signal features I focused on was whether or not you were RT'd or @'d by another influential account. Of course, this is a somewhat-recursive problem which made it difficult to wrangle with.

I eventually got something to work, but it was only possible because I had access to the Twitter firehouse and through the manual weighting of features.

@sbuccini This is the exact problem we have solved with our "influencer search" mode. There, we show you influencers based on keywords in content they've shared. :) Not based on their bio text. Though to do, but solves the exact problem you're talking about!

This approach is also flawed, as people tend to share different type of content at different times. The same person may be tweeting about a specific conference they attends to, commenting some breaking news or their holidays, etc. They may also change their interest over the course of time.

I created an influencers analytics solution some years ago (tribalytics.com), and Social Network Analysis (SNA) applied to people's followers got us much better results: Instead of analyzing a twitter user's bio, we would also cluster their followers into communities (according to how they follow each other), then summarize each community's characteristics. This gave us multiple accurate segments allowing to qualify a person

e.g.:

* 35% marketing and social media professional

* 10% foodie

* 15% kayak fan

* etc...

I'm not active anymore on this solution though, as that analysis was quite expensive and too complex for what our target customers marketers were looking for...

Isn't AleydaSolis involved in that project? Or perhaps it's someone else...

Also who are the big leaders in the influencer search tool space these days?

> Isn't AleydaSolis involved in that project? Or perhaps it's someone else...

Indeed, she participated in tribalytics for some time.

> Also who are the big leaders in the influencer search tool space these days?

I'm a bit rusty as the landscape evolves quickly, and I'm not much active anymore on the influence marketing sphere. Two actors which look relevant to me:

* getlittlebird.com

* traackr.com

> Of course, this is a somewhat-recursive problem which made it difficult to wrangle with.

Nothing wrong with recursion. You can keep re-applying that and normalize/rebalance the 'scores'. This is what one Mr. Brin did with one Mr. Page for web search. It really worked out well for them.

It's an easy to use page, and I enjoyed noodling around for a bit. I didn't get results that I expected, and I'm not sure if that's your product or Twitter. If I had money I might spend a little bit to try the product, but I don't think it's aimed at people like me. Good luck though!

I searched for [suicide prevention] in the UK. I expected to see near the top of the list Professor Louis Appleby (13.6k followers, advises UK government on suicide prevention) and the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with a Mental Illness (only 3.6 k followers, but is the most well known suicide prevention research project in UK)

I got a single page returned, and these two accounts were not on that page. If I change the location from UK to England I get a completely different, worse, set of results, and again these 2 aren't in there.

@ProfLAppleby

@NCISH_UK

(Also, it's weird to see me (300 followers) at number 12 in the UK list.)

Is this something that Twitter sucks at? Is it something to do with lower numbers of people using twitter for suicide prevention tweets?

Hi DanBC,

Naren, co-founder of Tweeple Search here. Did you try Influencer Search? Go here: https://tweeplesearch.com/?bio=suicide%20prevention&is_profi...

About filtering by location, Twitter allows users to fill free text in the LOCATION field. Hence the disparity. In your example, Professor Louis Appleby has set location as "Stockport station". :)

The heuristics seem overly blunt. Clicking on "Entrepreneur", which is the most visible endpoint on the homepage right now, returns a listing of people who have "celebrity" in their twitter profile, with Demi Lovato and her 40m+ follower count at top. Maybe the "influencers" option does something more interesting? I don't know, I accidentally initiated another search by clicking somewhere on the page, then hit the back button a couple of times to land at a page that told me my "daily limit has reached".

@danso: Yes, that is the bio search mode. It is simply a bio search sorted by the number of followers. When you switch to influencer search mode, you see results sorted by shares of the articles related to the keyword you searched for. We actually look for keywords in articles they shared by going through their content with NLP.

The free account allows a lot more searches. Do try.

I tried something on similar lines,there are some problems with this.Bio's usually don't represent the kind of person or field influencer but instead provide false positives. Eg:- If you search for topics like politics and history, you will find more people who propagate conspiracy theories in the results.Also, sometimes people add their interest in bio's which does not represent their influence in the topic.

Or: use the API from twitter (free up to 900 req/15 mins) and sort by followers: https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/users/search

What's the added value of Tweeple Search?

Hi,

Naren, co-founder of Tweeple Search here. Here are a few points:

1.The Twitter API is not a practical tool you can use to search for tens of thousands of people. Think rate limits. 2. Results there are not sorted by the number of followers (which is decent marker for influence) 3. Check out Tweeple Search's filters, they are very powerful 4. We can give you a list of influencers based on keywords in content they shared as opposed to keywords in their bios (very tough to do this!) 5. Search is only the beginning. Check out our analysis tools

Where do you get the data from? real time via twitter's api?

Calling it a trade secret would certainly be a stretch :)

You simply can't do this with Twitter realtime. You'd keep hitting API limits. We use a variety of techniques to collect this data.

Tweeple Search itself is based on the powerful Social Animal content intelligence product : https://socialanimal.io

I passed this onto marketing team and they seem to love it. I think a tool like this is what we have to use for more appropriate signups when doing any significant release.

Thanks, @navinsylvester!

Clicked on vegan and got this as top result:

    pewdiepie @pewdiepie  jackseptic replied to me 12/04
    17/f/Stockholm/Vegan/Lvl6YTHero/

Is there any way to do this for Instagram / Facebook / Pinterest?

This seems like it could be super useful.

Not really. Their APIs are super-restrictive. Also, their terms of use are another thing altogether.

on the twitter front, is there a good way to get secondary influencers that are following a primary influencer and interact with that influencer on a regular basis?

You can achieve this for a few accounts with the Twitter API, but due to API limits, it is tough to get it done at scale and make a product out of it. There are creative ways of achieving this, though.

Point in case: take a look at how Nuzzle works for Twitter accounts. It is very close to what you are asking for.

thanks for suggesting Nuzzle, I had not heard of this before.

We've solved it for Instagram: https://socialcull.typeform.com/to/QvznoL

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