The goal is to create powerful, current and informative content. However, it can be difficult to reach them if they are not data-driven.
After seven years of creating content, our team firmly believes that data as a driving element in your content campaign is the differentiator between good content and current, link-worthy content.
Finding creative sources for your data-driven content can sometimes be difficult, especially if what you want to investigate with your content cannot be revealed by a survey method or an existing record.
There are hundreds of data sources that you can use to design your content. However, the type of data I’m focusing on today can be captured by scraping publicly available information from social media platforms.
Social media platforms offer something unique that other data sources cannot. If you scrape a social media platform on purpose, you can get huge amounts of information from real people within minutes.
With the right analysis, this information can provide insights into the subject of your choice that the public would not otherwise have known. Any new, surprising, or controversial information that you derive from the analysis will make journalists take the exclusive and cover your content marketing campaign for their publisher.
In this post I will present five examples of social media scrapes that deserve top publisher press and why they worked. But first – what does social media data scraping mean anyway?
What is social media data scraping?
Social media data scraping is a method that uses third-party technologies to automatically scratch data from a website like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
Through the use of third parties Data scraping tools like Octoparse or ParsehubYou receive your data in a clear Excel package, with which you can analyze it as you wish.
Popular aspects of analyzing with social media records include performing mood analysis, analyzing the volume and frequency of specific words or symbols, and viewing patterns of individual words with location data.
Next, let’s examine how you can use the data you scratch to inspire future content.
How to use social media data as a source for your content
1. Search Instagram to develop fun ideas for content.
In our first example, let’s look at a content campaign called #SexiestLocations on Instagram.
The execution of this project was fairly simple: our research team collected over 4 million posts on Instagram that included the hashtag #sexy. They then analyzed the posts that contained a geolocation tag. From this they were able to determine the “sexiest” countries in the world as well as the US states.
Sure to say, the publishers have eaten it up.
While it is actually impossible to really know what the sexiest place in the world is (sexy is a subjective term), our team has created a fun campaign for our customers that uses geo-baits to target carefree online sites such as: shine, E! On-line, Women’s health, and Elite Daily.
2. Explore Twitter to learn more about an urgent topic.
In our second example, we’re looking at a campaign that covers a very different topic: college drinking habits.
Instead of exploring Instagram, the team instead analyzed Twitter tweets. The researchers examined tweets within a 1.5 mile radius of the center of small, four-year-old colleges and universities that contained the keywords “drunk”, “drinking”, “alcohol”, “alcohol”, “beer” or “wine”. “”
There are official rankings that are published every year and that universities in America compete to achieve the best “party school” in the country. This project speaks to this term in a new way, using data from Twitter to support these claims.
This campaign speaks for the ongoing discussion about the problem and the spread of dangerous amounts of college alcohol in America. Here, too, this campaign was able to use geo-baits and targeted digital PR coverage for the Huffington Post, Adweek, Elite Daily, and BroBible.
3. Don’t overlook social niche platforms like Yelp.
You don’t just have to stick to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram when creating content from social media data. There is a world of niche community platforms that can provide you with so much unique, interesting information that you won’t find anywhere else.
For example, this content example uses the popular Yelp restaurant rating platform to gain insight into American food preferences. What are the most popular kitchens in different cities across America? Using the Yelp Fusion API, this study analyzed more than 120,000 restaurants in the United States with their ratings, prices, and restaurant categories.
Yelp proved to be a treasure trove of solid data. This visualization shows viewers the most unique restaurants for each city, the number of restaurants and much more. You can see from this that Boston has more bagel restaurants per capita than other cities.
This project was very successful very quickly – once The exclusive went live In ULOOP’s Temple University department, it was quickly syndicated to other US university locations and over 100 unique media reports published.
4. Analyze tweets for advanced text knowledge.
There are times when using a Twitter scrape is simply not enough and you need external analysis. In one of the coolest uses of Twitter data I’ve ever seen, a campaign called “Most powerful women “ does exactly that.
IBM Watson Personality Insights is a free online tool from IBM that allows you to analyze text for the prevalence of character traits. Typically, you can use this tool to analyze speeches made by people or articles that they have written. If not, you can use your own Twitter timeline to get examples of how to write.
The study wanted to find out the similarities and differences between some of the 100 “most powerful” women in the world. From Oprah to Queen Elizabeth, there are numerous takeaways from this study.
The exclusive thing about this project started Bravo, a site that often treats powerful women for its audience anyway.
For those of us who also want to be powerful women, we can learn from the most common characteristics of these famous and powerful women which qualities bring us to the top.
5. Conduct a survey to find more actionable insights.
In my last example we will look at #AdAnalysis, a campaign that combines an Instagram scrape method with a survey of 1,000 Americans to gain fascinating insights into influencer marketing on Instagram.
The campaign researchers tried to answer a few questions: Which types of photos are popular for advertising and which demographic data respond most positively to advertised posts?
The first question was answered with data scraping, the second with a survey.
By combining the two research methods, the campaign was able to offer journalists and news publishers more comprehensive and actionable insights.
With this campaign, the desired niche of our customers was covered with placements Adweek, eMarketer, MarketingProfs, and Tech.co.
Best practices for social media scraping for content marketing campaigns
After creating over a hundred social media campaigns in the past seven years, we have experienced first-hand what types of social media campaigns stand out during digital public relations.
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit and Yelp all have their unique advantages and offer valuable insights into topics from the entire spectrum.
In this post, I went through five campaigns using social scraping as a method. All three campaigns represented different topics: college education, sex and relationships, food, leadership and advertising. This method can clearly be used in all industries – for almost every brand in any Niche.
Here are some tips to keep in mind when creating content with a social media scrape.
- Hashtags are usually subjective. So keep projects light-headed to get comprehensive coverage.
- Avoid using social scrape methods to talk about scientific or health issues. Individuals seeking health advice should obtain information from licensed professionals.
- Make sure that whatever you produce contributes to an ongoing conversation.
- Be careful when combining newsjacking and the scrape method, as trendy news topics can grow old very quickly if you don’t get coverage right away.
Have fun scraping!
