Brandwatch Updates: Great Coverage Just Got Better

Data. It is used to make our lives easier and more enjoyable.

It can even be argued that its curation and analysis is a major factor in the recent development of humans. It’s vital for understanding the world around us. It helps businesses understand complex relationships and make decisions accordingly.

Brandwatch Analytics is built around data – it collects, organizes, and makes sense of the Internet’s unstructured data. While Brandwatch’s products bring value to our clients, they mean nothing without the data that feeds them.

Acknowledging the importance of data, we will introduce new data sources, features, and coverage improvements over the next three days. They all bring our clients more data to utilize with Brandwatch Analytics and Vizia.

Today we’re announcing updates which improve coverage across multiple sources:

Smart Prioritization

Better coverage of Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” -Stephen Covey

We’ve done exactly that: we now search more often for keywords which are most popularly used in Queries by our clients. This increases the mention volumes from the sites which we’re trying it with: Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr.

---

New APIs

Boosted coverage of YouTube and Flickr

We continually upgrade to utilize the latest available APIs, which are tools that allow Brandwatch to get data directly from sources.

We’ve recently changed to the newest API for YouTube, and switched to the Commercial API for Flickr. These changes result in more mentions delivered in queries that match search term(s) in the title or description of videos and images.

---

VKontakte

Improved access to Russia’s largest social network

Social media has an interesting affect on communications: it makes it easier to connect and develop communities in ways which were previously impossible.

Researchers at Facebook and the University of Milan report that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world is 4.74, significantly less than the standard figure of 6 degrees.

The global shape of social media is also changing, potentially making the world populations’ degrees of separation even less. As of 2009 social media was highly fragmented with region-specific networks leading in their respective locales.

Large networks such as Facebook, QZone, and VKontakte are taking over local networks as the leader in most regions.

[twentytwenty]

[/twentytwenty]

 

VKontakte specifically represents a massive market, as it has 110 million registered users, with 54.6 million logging in every month. Brandwatch has changed to a new API and also started Smart Prioritization for VKontakte, which means we’ll supply better coverage of the publicly available posts and comments that match our clients’ Queries.

We know that our tools are only as good as the data that feeds them. We now crawl over 80 million sources so we can bring you clean, accurate data, as it happens.

Some sites – due to their structure, terms of use or API setup (or lack thereof) – can make it challenging to get 100% coverage, for any social analytics provider. However, we strive for as comprehensive coverage of those sites as possible, and are always making improvements and developing relationships to ensure our coverage continues to be best-in-class.

Now you know.