Affinio delivers behavioral marketing intelligence
"Market to people, not demographics." That's the premise behind Affinio marketing intelligence software. Understanding an audience's interests and passions allows marketers to develop data-driven content that will resonate and generate interaction. Identifying the best channels to distribute and promote this content helps maximize its impact. Easy to explain yet notoriously difficult to accomplish, yet Affinio seems to help marketers execute this combination with more precision.
It all starts with a report, currently generated using data from either a Twitter or Pinterest account. It's apparent that Affinio relies on extremely heavy data processing to generate results and the data is intelligently displayed. Mousing over a particular piece of data offers a concise description of its significance, making it relatively easy to get acquainted with the various components of the software.
Reports are divided into five sections; overview, members, interest, content, and monitor. The entire audience, in this case Twitter followers of @waxgirl333, is divided into eight different segments or tribes, based on interest and connectivity. The five sections previously mentioned apply both at a general level and for individual tribes. That allows you to drill down and see the same type of information at the lower level. This is great if you wish to target the interests of a particular group of followers. However, in this case we'll use Affinio to take a bird's eye view
OverviewHere we can see how tribes are connected, which ones are most active on Twitter, have shared interests and their degree of interconnectivity. Shared interests within a tribe is a percentage from 0 to 100 (higher is better) that helps pinpoint tribes that share common interests, ideal for creating pieces of content aimed at those with specific interests. Interconnectivity is a percentage score where a higher number indicates a greater likelihood that people within the tribe know and follow each other. If you're looking to network with your audience, focusing on tribes with high shared interest and interconnectivity is probably the most efficient route.
MembersThe Members section provides a deeper understanding of some basic audience characteristics. It's divided into six different subsections; profiles, locations, most liked, most retweeted, engagement and stream.
Profiles- This section shows images for the top 100 most relevant members to give you an idea of how they represent themselves visually. The top bio keywords this audience uses to describe themselves are also provided in a chart with bars that let you simultaneously see how other tribes use this term. The top categories of audience members and the devices they use to tweet from are also provided. Three different types of graphs are available for this data.
Locations - The location of every tribe member is plotted using a heat map. Individual tribes can be isolated on the map to reveal any location differences. Knowing where members of your tribes live can be helpful in creating content that reflects regional differences.
Most Liked - This section is a timeline of the most liked posts by members of the audience. What better way to get to know your audience! It's very useful when applied at the tribe level where marketers can focus on particular interests.
Most Retweeted - Liking and retweeting are two distinct forms of engagement on Twitter, so it makes sense that Affinio provides data for both type of interactions.
Engagement- This element contains two line graphs that reveal the time of day and days of the week when audience members are tweeting. Different tribes can tweet at significantly different times as this report shows. Again, this is useful when marketing to specific segments of a general audience.
Stream - How does your audience or tribe experience Twitter? That's what this report attempts to replicate by generating a stream through the compilation of Tweets from the top 100 most relevant accounts for that tribe.
InterestsThe Interests section of Affinio can be very helpful in finding suitable partners and influencers to help reach your target customer. It provides insight into the top interests of your audience or tribe, according to the following categories; brands, celebrities, community, entertainment, media, place, society, and sports, each with their own subcategories. Each interest features an affinity score (how likely members of your tribe are to follow this account compared to all or Twitter) and relevance score.
ContentAffinio has a content component that helps marketers understand the type of content being consumed by members of the audience or tribe. This section is divided into four subsections; topics, links, visual media, and domains.
Topics - This component contains four data points that can be displayed in four different ways. The first is Hashtags, showing the most popular hashtags used in this audience. Mentions shows the most mentioned users by this audience. Tweet Keywords shows the most Tweeted keywords utilized by this tribe. Emojis shows the tops emojis used by members of this audience.
Links - This area displays a stream of the most shared links by members of this audience. You can see how many times each link was shared, with a color-coded bar dividing those shares according to tribes. Clicking on a link opens up the content in a new browser tab so you can exactly see what was shared.
Visual Media - This shows the most shared photos and videos by members of this audience.
Domains - A graph that can be displayed in three different ways showing the domains where members of the audience are finding and sharing content. This is great or finding out where your audience spends most of their time.
MonitorThe data that gets generated for reports is static, so it only gives you insight into a specific moment in time. The Monitor section is where a report gets updated to see changes in followers, topics, and trends. Updates can be scheduled daily weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or one time only. Subscribers receive an email detailing audience changes and dashboard also updates the information.
So, does Affinio do everything it claims? It requires enormous amounts of data to segment an audience according to interests, show the type of content they consume, and share and reveal the best places and people to share this content. Affinio does an admirable job of creating a concise and meaningful representation of all this information. Ultimately, knowledge like this can arguably give any marketer a competitive advantage. Reports are just one element of an integrated marketing strategy, however, and need to be part of a strong overall measurement process in order to be effective.
Note: We were given Affinio by the company. However, there were no strings attached and this opinion is uniquely ours.