Advertising pre-social media slides towards the more creative side of the industry and the Advertiser decides what kind of content attracts the potential target audience for the brand. The advertiser here is generally the senior person in the company with the most years of experience credited to their name. Not to undermine their experience, but the centralization of decision making without reliable data to back those decisions means most of the brands are shooting at the black hole leaning over the shoulders of advertiser’s experience. In this article, we dive into understanding the nuances of social media influencer data extraction that helps various stakeholders.
The advent of Social media changed the game for the advertising industry. With data available from all corners, the brands are leaning towards the companies which leverage the social media data available online and take decisions backed by reliable data. While the big whales in the industry became bigger by acquiring a lot of boutique digital/social media firms across the globe, there are many other companies that are trying to solve use-cases for different stakeholders in social media. In this article, we will try to explore how influencer marketing companies are using social media data extraction as a main tool to identify the influencers and are trying to bridge the connect gap with sponsors.
For influencers, it’s imperative for them to understand their audience and metrics to market themselves to potential sponsors. For sponsors, to find out which influencer is best fit for their products.
Identifying the influencers
Data extraction is the key component of the influencer discovery process. The method isn’t the same for each platform, the DaaS provider needs to have expertise to understand the tweaks required for each platform to yield most appropriate results for the client optimising the cost. For instance, an approach one can consider to identify and extract the influencers details :
- Find the top or most recent posts by location or hashtags.
- Decide on the number of posts data to extract (eg – the recent 1000 posts per location).
- Decide on the social media influencer data fields to extract. Extracting the posts data and profile handle is not enough information to identify the influencers, one needs to dive to the page source and see what other profile related details can be extracted like followers, count, etc.,
- The social media influencer data extracted with these details serves as a raw material to find out influencers based on any custom metric like the post’s engagement rate or the followers count
The shortlisted influencers can be taken to the next level of scrape to extract Profile related data. The custom nature of this process gives flexibility for the companies to decide how frequent, what data fields one would like to extract.
Social Media Influencer Data Extraction – Understanding Your Audience
The influencers with thousands of followers would want to understand their audience for many reasons including preparing media kits and presenting themselves with data about the posts and followers engagement metrics. Though there are many templates and tools which provide this data, most of the influencers, generally would rely upon an agency to make sense of the data.
The expertise required to extract the followers would involve multiple ways. One of the following approaches can be considered:
- Extract all the followers from an influencer profile and then scrape the followers profile data OR
- If one wants to focus on only those followers who are engaging in the posts, the scrape can focus only on extracting the followers data who engaged, commented on the posts .
There are many roads to reach the destination and as a custom DaaS provider, we suggest companies in this domain with various feasible approaches that’s needed to extract the data subject to the client’s objective.