Amy Collins on Data: Blogs and Instagram Update

This week’s blog will focus on the data coverage news from the Brandwatch Data teams: I’ve got news to share on global blog coverage and an Instagram engineering update.

Global blog feed has gone live

 

I’m happy to be able to share that we just turned on a new data source which is a global feed of blogs and similar content (including a significantly higher volume of Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr blogs).

We bought it in as a part of the AsiaPac data project where our plan is to be the number one destination for marketers needing social data for the region. However, we ended up buying a global feed because blogs are much harder to geographically locate and so if we were to filter by language buying all local languages and English, it was a no brainer to just buy a global feed.

So, in summary – this is a win for all Brandwatch customers – as of today we’re seeing higher volumes of blog data coming in across all geographies.

You don’t need to do anything to benefit from this, the data will transparently appear in all your queries. As with the News coverage announcement last time, if you do monthly reporting on volumes, you may want to note the increased volumes as a footnote if you see a sudden uptick on your metrics.

Tune in on the 5th of April, when we’ll share some of the results of this new data source and more.

Kudos to Eugeny, Laura, Ed, and Callum our developers on the Data Partnerships team for their hard work and consistent delivery in bringing more data to our customers.

Instagram capacity improvement update

A few weeks ago, in my blog on Instagram, I promised that we were working on increasing our coverage for hashtags. In last week’s release, we rolled out a new architecture which will give us the ability to scale up our coverage significantly.

This new architecture will give us the ability to horizontally scale our crawling for Instagram (i.e. more servers rather than bigger servers). Our Data Crawling team are still in the process of optimising the new hardware and load balancing the crawling and we remain confident that we’ll see some significant improvements within the next month.

I’ll report back on the results in a future blog.