Twitter and mozRank Help Us Measure What's Important

Brandwatch is a data company: our crawlers are dedicated to finding as many pages out there as they can. For our customers, higher volumes of data are generally better – they have more to work with, and can drill down using filters, keyword searches or browsing through topics. But given thousands of pages per day or per week, how does a human decide which are the most important ones to look at? Which ones need attention first? Which blogs or forums have the most impact, or influence?

As developers, we may not be able to directly answer those questions because typically they’re subjective. But what we can do is provide meta-data that helps our users make that judgement. At the beginning of October, we added a new feature to Brandwatch: metrics about the source of each page. We’re using a couple of excellent services to bring in this meta-data: the mozRank API from SEOmoz and the Twitter API.

The mozRank API provides some very useful site metrics, including the number of backlinks to the site and the mozRank, which is a score from 0 to 10, giving a feel for how important the site is. I tend to think of the mozRank as being like Google’s PageRank – it tries to distill the number of inbound links (and how important those referring sites are, in turn) into a single score. For twitter pages, we now show the number of followers that tweeter has, how many tweets they’ve written, and the number of others they are following. You can sort the data using these metrics, to help sift out the most important pages from the passing chatter.