Understanding Social Signal
Why Social Signal Is Important
Millions of consumers are talking about your business, your competitors, relevant events and products, and searching for related things on the social web right now. Having the ability to extract, quantify, and take action on relevant content being shared within the social web benefits businesses in a variety of ways:
Identifying What’s Popular – In Real Time
Leveraging the social web to understand what’s most popular helps publishers decide what content to promote on their site and guides content aggregator’s content creation processes. E-commerce providers can leverage social signal to ensure the products people are talking about appear higher in their product listings.
Discovering The Newest, Freshest Links
Search engines that only crawl the web and rank on link citations miss the importance of links that are being shared in realtime by influential people within social networks. By incorporating social signal into their search results, search engines can provide a better consumer experience by exposing consumers to the newest, freshest links being shared on the social web
Historical Tracking
Many industries use historical trends to predict what will occur in the future. Harnessing historical social signal to track mentions of keywords, terms and links for the past year (or years) can be used to determine demand and trends, show the volume of people interested in seasonal products and services, and even track how opinions change over periods of time through sentiment analysis.
Predicting What Will Be
Being able to quantify the extent to which something is being talked about empowers businesses to identify future demand. Trending metrics that describe the peaks and valleys of content demand with high levels of precision can be used to predict and anticipate future demand. Metrics such as velocity, momentum and peak period scores can be used in conjunction with on-site and search log metrics to accurately predict the extent to which content is trending, to the link and keyword level.
Influencing The Influencers
Understanding who has influence within the social web down to the keyword and link level enables businesses to create strategies to influence the influencers. Once true influencers are identified, businesses can perform appropriate outreach, hopefully in a way that is not perceived as spam, to communicate with these people.
Determining What’s Important
Curating the most important content from the social web in realtime is difficult – there’s a lot of noise, and it’s hard to identify what’s really relevant from a constant stream of thousands (or millions) of posts. Using a combination of influence and trending metrics, Topsy’s technology surfaces the most relevant content in realtime. This enables publishers, content aggregators, and e-commerce providers to increase the relevance of their own content.
Tracking Opinions Over Time
Sentiment represents the positive or negative associations consumers have about something. Understanding sentiment, in both realtime and historical forms, enables businesses to interpret the impact their marketing programs have as measured by expressions on the social web. Having extensive historical baselines enables businesses to gauge realtime sentiment relative to historical benchmarks, so current performance can be evaluated properly.
Tuning Signal To Noise
There are more than one billion tweets every week on Twitter. A lot of it is spam, trivial musings, and irrelevant communication. Special algorithms and technology must be used to filter out the non-important communication and rank the remaining relevant content so the most valuable communication is identified. And, this should be done in as close to realtime as possible so businesses can capitalize upon recent intelligence.
Topsy’s influence algorithm measures the attention people generate from the content they author and post within a social network. Influence is earned over time based on the actions people take after reading someone’s communication. Our influence algorithm has ranked content for the past three years to power our leading real-time consumer search engine, topsy.com. Just as inbound link clicks provide the basis for search engine page rankings, the amount of attention people generate, measured down to the keyword and domain level, provide the basis for effectively quantifying and measuring social signal.