What Customers Want

This data was originally featured in the June 30, 2021 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2021/06/inbox-insights-june-30-2021-what-customers-want-ai-distractions-twitter-bios/

In this week’s Data Diaries, we do something a little different. We want to know what customers want, specifically ours. One of the most important things you can do is understand your audience a little better, the people that make up your audience and their backgrounds and interests. One of the easiest data sources for this are things like Twitter bios, which are generally accessible and can be extracted in bulk using Twitter’s API. For fun, we first extracted the followers of Trust Insights (not following us? Pop over to twitter.com/trustinsights) to see who our audience is.

When we extract all the individual words and ngrams (phrases) from our followers’ Twitter bios, we end up with a table that looks something like this:

From just this small snapshot of information, we know a fair amount about our audience. Some things are not surprising; social media and digital marketing feature in the bios of our Twitter followers most commonly. Other things are a bit more of a surprise like “Fresno State” and “real estate”; we don’t typically associate those with our normal audience.

Let’s try a different account. Here’s what IT World Canada’s followers look like, in terms of bios.

This is decidedly a very different group of people, and we see dramatically different topics in the bios of the audience. If I were working for IT World, I’d use this data to perhaps field a survey with the audience, to see if these topics really do resonate with them. If they did, I might take a look at the content I was producing and see if it was aligned – cybersecurity content would be top of my list.

The survey part is key; our audience on Twitter may not be representative of our audience overall, so we’d use this data qualitatively, to inform more balanced, more robust quantitative research. However, this gives us a nice head start.

I encourage you to perform the same kind of analysis on your Twitter followers – and especially on your competitors’ followers. You may be able to identify topics that are blind spots for you (or for them) and can inform further research for your marketing strategy.

Methodology: Trust Insights used data extracted from Twitter’s API based on the handles of followers. For IT World Canada, we extracted 5,000 handles’ bios at random as a sample of their much larger audience. The timeframe of the data is April 1, 2021 – June 20, 2021. The date of study is June 29, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.