When it comes to finding the best content, the right way to go about it typically starts with finding the best people. If you want a good piece on Apple, Twitter or social gaming, you go to those writers who work in the space and understand it well.
But it’s not always easy to figure out exactly who the best, most authoritative person is in a space. That’s where PeerReach comes in. Founded back in 2011 by Zlatan Menkovic and Nico Schoonderwoerd, this Amsterdam-based company began as an index of content creators on social media networks like Twitter.
The current PeerReach index displays relevancy on topics for 85 million accounts. They’ve grouped these accounts into PeerGroups surrounding topics like the ‘tech web’, blogging, sports, film, politics and more. The people in the index are ranked across 400 topics in 12 regions according to the 10 million most important tweets every day.
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They also have an API which has had some amount of pickup by some small companies and indie developers, which allow access to the index and its relevance information. Looking at the top lists paints a generally accurate picture of what’s going on in the Twitter world, though PeerReach has plans to add other signals from LinkedIn and Facebook.
At the Microsoft BizSpark Startup Rally, PeerReach is launching a new platform that will focus on the second layer of data abstraction: content. Now that they’ve figured out who the most influential people are, they’re able to turn that index onto the content created by those people and surface it for users. Currently, PeerReach requires a login via Twitter, but Menkovic says that the new platform will not. This will open up a path to a realtime content delivery system that’s a sort of ‘curated’ version of Twitter.
In addition, the next version of PeerReach is launching tomorrow, and will feature a bunch of improved ways to track a profile like audience insights, which shows how many of your followers are both reading and ‘listening’ to the stuff you’re saying. It also allows you to see the groups that you’re affecting segmented out.
Some of us on social media networks like Twitter have been producing an enormous amount of content, even if it is a mixture of casual conversation, dumb jokes and oh-so-serious work. We’re just beginning to see how that content is being consumed and acted on, and tools like PeerReach are among the efforts to analyze, quantify and present that data. It’s a young market, and we’ll see where it goes from here, but so far, so interesting.
Image credit: Thinkstock
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