
Show HN: Tweeple Search – Find relevant audience and influencers on Twitter - shuss
https://tweeplesearch.com/
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sbuccini
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.

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naren87
@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!

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me_bx
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...

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AznHisoka
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?

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me_bx
> 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

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DanBC
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?

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naren87
Hi DanBC,

Naren, co-founder of Tweeple Search here. Did you try Influencer Search? Go
here:
[https://tweeplesearch.com/?bio=suicide%20prevention&is_profi...](https://tweeplesearch.com/?bio=suicide%20prevention&is_profile=true&type=influencers&sort_by=score&page=1&order=desc)

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". :)

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danso
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".

~~~
naren87
@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.

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karthiksk2012
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.

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bartkappenburg
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](https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/users/search)

What's the added value of Tweeple Search?

~~~
naren87
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

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brak1
Where do you get the data from? real time via twitter's api?

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naren87
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](https://socialanimal.io)

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navinsylvester
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.

~~~
naren87
Thanks, @navinsylvester!

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Kiro
Clicked on vegan and got this as top result:

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

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

This seems like it could be super useful.

~~~
naren87
Not really. Their APIs are super-restrictive. Also, their terms of use are
another thing altogether.

~~~
tmaly
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?

~~~
naren87
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.

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

