6 ms·

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

62 points by shuss 9y ago

bartkappenburg 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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
DanBC 9y ago
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?
- naren87 9y ago
  Hi DanBC, Naren, co-founder of Tweeple Search here. Did you try Influencer Search? Go here: https://tweeplesearch.com/?bio=suicide%20prevention&is_profile=true&type=influencers&sort_by=score&page=1&order=desc 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". :)
Kiro 9y ago
Clicked on vegan and got this as top result: pewdiepie @pewdiepie jackseptic replied to me 12/04 17/f/Stockholm/Vegan/Lvl6YTHero/
brak1 9y ago
Where do you get the data from? real time via twitter's api?
- naren87 9y ago
  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
tmaly 9y ago
Is there any way to do this for Instagram / Facebook / Pinterest? This seems like it could be super useful.
- naren87 9y ago
  Not really. Their APIs are super-restrictive. Also, their terms of use are another thing altogether.
  - tmaly 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        thanks for suggesting Nuzzle, I had not heard of this before.
- artur_makly 9y ago
  We've solved it for Instagram: https://socialcull.typeform.com/to/QvznoL https://socialcull.typeform.com/to/QvznoL
sbuccini 9y ago
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.
- naren87 9y ago
  @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!
  - me_bx 9y ago
    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...
    - AznHisoka 9y ago
danso 9y ago
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 9y ago
  @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.
navinsylvester 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Thanks, @navinsylvester!
karthiksk2012 9y ago
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.

62 points by shuss 9y ago

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 9y ago
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

DanBC 9y ago

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?

naren87 9y ago
Hi DanBC, Naren, co-founder of Tweeple Search here. Did you try Influencer Search? Go here: https://tweeplesearch.com/?bio=suicide%20prevention&is_profile=true&type=influencers&sort_by=score&page=1&order=desc 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". :)

Kiro 9y ago

Clicked on vegan and got this as top result: pewdiepie @pewdiepie jackseptic replied to me 12/04 17/f/Stockholm/Vegan/Lvl6YTHero/

brak1 9y ago

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

naren87 9y ago
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

tmaly 9y ago

Is there any way to do this for Instagram / Facebook / Pinterest? This seems like it could be super useful.

naren87 9y ago
Not really. Their APIs are super-restrictive. Also, their terms of use are another thing altogether.
- tmaly 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      thanks for suggesting Nuzzle, I had not heard of this before.
artur_makly 9y ago
We've solved it for Instagram: https://socialcull.typeform.com/to/QvznoL https://socialcull.typeform.com/to/QvznoL

sbuccini 9y ago

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.

naren87 9y ago
@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!
- me_bx 9y ago
  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...
  - AznHisoka 9y ago

danso 9y ago

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 9y ago
@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.

navinsylvester 9y ago

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 9y ago
Thanks, @navinsylvester!

karthiksk2012 9y ago

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.