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Posted by petebray

Followerwonk has always been primarily about social graph analysis and exploration: from tracking follower growth, comparing relationships, and so on.

Followerwonk now adds content analysis and user profiling, too

In the Analyze tab, you'll find a new option to examine any Twitter user's tweets. (Note that this is a Pro-only feature, so you'll need to be a subscriber to use it.)

You can also access these profile pages by simply clicking on a Twitter username anywhere else in Followerwonk.

For us, this feature is really exciting, because we let you analyze not just yourself, but other people too. In fact, Pro users can analyze as many other Twitter accounts as they want!

Now, you'll doubtlessly learn lots by analyzing your own tweets. But you already probably have a pretty good sense of what content works well for you (and who you engage with frequently).

We feel that Profile Pages really move the needle by letting you surface the relationships and content strategies of competitors, customers, and prospects.

Let's take a closer look.

Find the people any Twitter user engages with most frequently

Yep, just plug in a Twitter name and we'll analyze their most recent 2000 tweets. We'll extract out all of the mentions and determine which folks they talk to the most.

Here, we see that @dr_pete talks most frequently with (or about) Moz, Rand, Elisa, and Melissa. In fact, close to 10% of his tweets are talking to these four! (Note the percentage above each listed name.)

This analysis is helpful as it lets you quickly get a sense for the relationships that are important for this person. That provides possible inroads to that person in terms of engagement strategies.

Chart when and what conversations happen with an analyzed user's most important relationships

We don't just stop there. By clicking on the little “see engagement” link below each listed user, you can see the history of the relationship.

Here, we can see when the engagements happened in the little chart. And we actually show you the underlying tweets, too.

This is a great way to quickly understand the context of that relationship: is it a friendly back and forth, a heated exchange, or the last gasp of a bad customer experience? Perhaps the tweets from a competitor to one his top customers occurred weeks back? Maybe there's a chance for you to make inroads to that customer?

There's all sorts of productive tea-reading that can happen with this feature. And, by the way, don't forget that you already have the ability to track all the relationships a competitor forms (or breaks), too.

Rank any Twitter user's tweets by importance to surface their best content

This is my favorite feature—by far—in Followerwonk.

Sure, there are other tools that tell you your most popular tweets, but there are few that let you turn that feature around and examine other Twitter users. This is important because (let's face it) few of us have the volume of RTs and favorites to make self-analysis that useful. But when we examine top Twitter accounts, we come away with hints about what content strategies they're using that work well.

Here we see that Obama's top tweets include a tribute, an irreverent bit of humor, and an image that creatively criticizes a recent Supreme Court ruling. What lessons might you draw from the content that works best for Obama? What content works best for other people? Their image tweets? Tweets with humor? Shorter tweets? Tweets with links? Go do some analyzing!

Uncover top source domains of any Twitter users

Yep, we dissect all the URLs for any analyzed user to assemble a list of their top domains.

This feature offers a great way to quickly snapshot the types of content and sources that users draw material from. Moreover, we can click on "see mentions" to see a timeline of when those mentions occurred for each domain, as well as what particular tweets accounted for them.

In sum…

These features offer exciting ways to quickly profile users. Such analysis should be at the heart of any engagement strategy: understand who your target most frequently engages with, what content makes them successful, and what domains they pull from.

At the same time, this approach reveals content strategies—what, precisely, works well for you, but also for other thought leaders in your category. Not only can you draw inspiration from this approach, but you can find content that might deserve a retweet (or reformulation in your own words).

I don't want to go too Freudian on you, but consider this: What's the value of self-analysis? I mean that to say that unless you have a lot of data, any analytics product isn't going to be totally useful. That's why this addition in Followerwonk is so powerful. Now you can analyze others, including thought leaders in your particular industry, to find the secrets of their social success.

Start analyzing!

Finally, this is a bittersweet blog post for me. It's my last one as a Mozzer. I'm off to try my hand at another bootstrapping startup: this time, software that lets you build feature tours and elicit visitor insights. I'm leaving Followerwonk in great hands, and I look forward to seeing awesome new features down the line. Of course, you can always stay in touch with me on Twitter. Keep on wonkin'!

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