Last updated on January 25th, 2016 at 04:33 pm
If you’re on the prowl for influencers in your space, no matter your field, we can’t say enough good things about the revamping of Little Bird, a social discovery platform quarterbacked by Marshall Kirkpatrick, CEO of the company and former co-editor of ReadWriteWeb. Available for four years, Little Bird lets you find and engage with influencers, while also uncovering content going viral around a certain theme, keyword or Twitter user.
Little Bird analyzes results first on Twitter, studies the connections between people there, then finds the people with influence on Twitter over on other social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Today, Kirkpatrick announced the details of the next version of Little Bird. In an interview with B2B NN, he says now was the best time to roll out an update because “customers have consistently told us that they want more powerful filtering, deeper insights, and easier tools for ongoing engagement.”
He identified three key updates to this version compared to its predecessor.
Deeper insights: Now you can analyze the intersection of influencers across multiple networks, says Kirkpatrick, based in Portland. He says, “For example, who are the B2B marketing influencers most interested in Microsoft’s Hololens? If you’re working on Hololens marketing for B2B, you’d love to know.” The new Little Bird can dig through Twitter to find the intersection of those two topics.
Social listening plus social graph analysis: Many of Little Bird competitors surface influencers by looking for people who use keywords in their content, then rank them by their popularity with the public at large. “That’s really noisy and is often gamed,” notes Kirkpatrick. “Little Bird has always focused on social graph analysis: looking at the relevant followers someone has in their field. Now you can run a Little Bird report that does both: finds people who have used a keyword, then analyzes the connections between them. That’s the best of both worlds, for maximum relevance and insight in analyzing a public conversation.”
B2B NN can attest, after touring this product, that the above feature is extremely powerful for marketers or managers. Finding the connections between influencers can better let you see who might be ideal to contact or follow on Twitter.
Engage by email: The new Little Bird lets you to subscribe to Daily Mission emails from as many networks as you’d like. Kirkpatrick adds: “Those contain one suggestion of an influencer in your topic of interest that you’re not yet connected with, but that you should consider engaging, and three pieces of trending content from thought leaders in your industry.” This can be a valuable tool to not only relevantly grow your follower base but also reveal who you might want to contact about, say, a product launch or hire for a speaking engagement.
Other updates can boost your social media mining work. You can search inside an influencer’s bios, as well as scanning multiple social networks to uncover the most active users on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. And if you want to filter results by geography, you can do so easily, and a handy map shows you the influencers in various regions (as long as that ge0-data is available via a Twitter bio).
We found out search speed has been boosted significantly, so much so results are now provided in response to near real-time data. Many other platforms still are faced with a 24-hour delay when spitting out results.
Pricing is available on request and is tiered by seats, all of which can run an unlimited number of real-time influencer reports. Plans typically range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month.
When asked who would be the ideal Little Bird customer, Kirkpatrick replies, “Either a brand marketer with a love of analytics and research, or an agency that works with brands on engagement and content creation. There are many ways you can use Little Bird, but those are the ways we’ve seen people get the best results.”
Little Bird 2.0 arrives shortly after the company secured another round of funding, initiated by Jason Calacanis’s Launch Fund. Little Bird has now raised a total of $4.7 million over the past 3 years.
To learn more about Little Bird’s update, visit this blog post.
Photos courtesy Marshall Kirkpatrick
