“Show me the NYC startups that have raised a seed round in the last year that are in the top 5% of Twitter follower growth and the top 10% of Twitter engagement”
This shouldn’t be a hard question to answer, but it has been.
As a result, Twitter which is a phenomenal “early-warning system” for startup tech companies that have momentum or which are trending has been relatively underutilized. If a startup company is getting mentioned a lot on Twitter or if people are engaging with a startup’s brand, it’s a great signal to indicate something good may be happening with that company.
However, discovery of these trending startup companies on Twitter in any systematic, non ad hoc way has been impossible to-date for a couple of reasons:
- Nobody had the data structured in a searchable, useful way
- Comparing startups across Twitter metrics is difficult and unintuitive
Nobody has the data structured in a searchable, useful way
We’ve been collecting Performance Metrics data on startup companies (Twitter, hiring, web traffic, Facebook, news mentions) for some time and have now incorporated Twitter into our Company and Deal searches to allow you to ask questions like the one above.
Comparing startups across Twitter metrics is difficult and unintuitive
How many RTs per month is good for a startup to have?
What’s a great follower/following ratio?
Is a startup that gets 1,000 new followers in the last month great, average or bad?
Twitter metrics are inherently not intuitive and the questions above highlight the challenge. Asking a client to have a view on these measures on their own is in one word – a burden.
And so we realized that if we want to help clients identify who is trending, we need to make it more intuitive. To do this, we’ve analyzed all startups’ Twitter performance measures and stratified them based on their percentile rank.
So now, you don’t have to understand whether a great follower/following ratio is 10 or 100. You just indicate you want companies in the top 1% or top 10% versus all other startups. It is more intuitive and relativity is inherent.
Integrating Startup Twitter Data into Search
Starting today, clients will see new filters on the left-hand side of the Company and Deal search pages. For people who just want answers based on how a company is performing on Twitter as a whole, the Overall filter will give you that in one easy-to-use filter.
While abstracting Twitter performance across various sub-measures into a single measure like the Overall score does, this wasn’t sufficient for some of our power clients that wanted the ability to dive into the performance of each individual Twitter metric. For these clients, a simple click on the “Show Detailed Twitter Filters” will reveal 5 more filters:
- Number of Followers
- Engagement
- Followers / Following Ratio
- Followers Growth
- Mentions Growth
Find startups with high engagement AND follower growth
Now let’s suppose we are trying to find companies that are hitting their stride on Twitter. A good indication of that might be if a company has high engagement on Twitter and a growing follower base.
To perform this search, we’ll look at tech companies who score in the top 5% in terms of Engagement and Follower Growth and we’ll also layer on a total funding criteria to ensure we have companies who’ve raised relatively little in case we’re looking for still modestly funded companies.
This turns up 6 private companies that are seeing a high level of engagement and quickly growing follower base. It includes younger companies such as mobile social news aggregator Nuzzle as well as more established companies such as 37 Signals (the makers of Basecamp project management software). Interestingly, 37 Signals has consciously avoided significant outside capital (minus an early round from Jeff Bezos) but continues to grow engagement and its follower base.
Conclusion
As with all our newer searches, this search is built on top of Amazon’s CloudSearch and powered via our API. This means our searches will continue to serve up results fast as we continue to add more data and filtering capabilities. Specifically, we look forward to incorporating the rest of our performance metrics into our Company and Deal searches over the next couple of months.
We’d love to hear what you think – Feel free to drop a line in the comments, via email or on Twitter.
And as always, we are hiring 🙂
Please note at present the Twitter filters are only available to paid customers at our higher subscription levels.
Main image from Slashgear