Not much surprised Michael Hussey, founder of PeekAnalytics, when his team analyzed Mitt Romney’s followers on Twitter and found that they are generally older and wealthier than Barack Obama’s followers.
In addition to age and income levels, PeekAnalytics follower reports include gender, geography, education, interests, and industry. As Hussey explains “we know quite a bit more about Twitter users than Twitter does.”
The PeekAnalytics platform grew out of PeekYou, a “white pages for the social web” also founded by Hussey, which sees about 10 million unique visitors each month.
PeekYou’s goal, according to Hussey “is to map out everyone’s disparate social footprint into one search result.” By taking publicly searchable social profile data, PeekYou builds a search result for individuals that includes links to all of their social networks.
PeekAnalytics, in turn, leverages this data to provide valuable insights about a brand or organization’s followers. Using PeekAnalytics, marketers can also measure the efficacy of their campaigns.
When asked how PeekAnalytics differs from Klout, a service that purports to measure influence in social media, Hussey notes that PeekAnalytics isn’t “looking at the contents of any tweets or the content of who you’re tweeting to or about. We’re looking at the demographics and psycograhpics of your followers.”
With so many brands and organizations taking to social media to spread their message, the next great challenge is to measure what impact this has, either to sell products or win votes. Platforms like PeekAnalytics are key to measuring the impact of social media campaigns.
Advertisers have a good sense, for example, of the impact a broadcast TV campaign will have on a candidate’s name ID, but how does one measure the impact of a viral Twitter hashtag campaign?
The ultimate goal for PeekAnalytics, according to Hussey, is to become the “Nielsen rating for social audiences.”
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