Influencer Marketing and Audience Profiling: Deep Dive into Mastodon with eCairn
We are thrilled to announce that eCairn now extends its coverage to Mastodon.
The case for Mastodon
Mastodon, with its user base of approximately 13 million, is clearly small in comparison to giants like Twitter, Threads ….
However, when it comes to engagement and participation, Mastodon stands out. Here's why:
Higher User Engagement: Analysis of social graphs reveals that Mastodon users are far more interconnected than their counterparts on other platforms. Specifically, the density of these graphs, or the number of connections per user, is significantly higher on Mastodon. We compared with Twitter on similar groups of people and we found that people on Mastodon have 16 times more connections within a particular group.
Richer Content Creation: Mastodon users not only produce more content, but they also engage more deeply with it. When "retwooting" (Mastodon's version of retweeting), users frequently add their own commentary or perspective, a behavior less commonly seen on Twitter.
Niche Appeal: While Mastodon might not be for everyone, it holds significant appeal for certain niches. The platform has seen an influx in users interested in politics, especially after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Additionally, the tech community finds it a vibrant space for discussion.
In essence, Mastodon offers a unique environment where active participation and meaningful interactions are the norm rather than the exception.
https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
With the latest addition to our platform, users can delve deeper into Mastodon communities and audiences to gain valuable insights. Here's what you can achieve with our new feature:
Map a Mastodon Audience: Dive into the demographics and interests of Mastodon users, giving you a holistic view of your target audience.
Visualize the Social Graph: Gain a comprehensive perspective of the Mastodon community. Understand how users are interconnected and easily pinpoint key influencers who can amplify your message.
Deep Dive into User Profiles: Understand who the Mastodon users are in your selected audience. Filter and sort based on specific criteria such as bio, location, and more to streamline your outreach or research efforts.
Analyze Conversations & Content: Don't just listen; truly understand. Find out what Mastodon users are discussing (or "tooting" as they call it). Identify trending topics, mine content for insights, and tailor your strategies accordingly.
To give you a taste of what's possible, we've prepared a demo using the followers of Augie Ray as our sample audience. Dive in to see the power of eCairn's Mastodon integration in action!
Augie’s profile - 5K Followers
1- Map the Mastodon Audience
After uploading Augie’s followers into an eCairn’s project , we got the following list of users:
(the list is filtered to remove bots….)
As you can see on the right side, we also get people’s reach and influence score. The influencer score is based on cross linking/ retwoots from people within the list.
2- Visualize the Social Graph and identify influencers
Here is the social graph for this list of people. In the graph each link is a connection or a retwoot
Social graph of Mastodon' followers
This is very useful to understand the structure of the community and also to pin point influencers within a specific cluster. Here there is clearly a “green” cluster and N Parsons is the top influencer in that cluster.
The application doesn’t (yet) name and interpret the cluster. However, mining the bio of people in this cluster, we get a pretty good persona for the people in this cluster:
3- Deep Dive into User Profiles
User profiles are enriched using different techniques and we collect information from many social platforms and also extend the analysis mining the picture to get gender/age information and using white pages to get postal code
(*) coverage is variable depending on data point and people’s presence in social media
The list/database of people is searchable so if you want to zoom on people who work in “marketing”, you can filter on their bio or job title:
4- Analyze Conversations & Content
Every "toot" (Mastodon's equivalent of a tweet) published by these users is meticulously gathered by eCairn. Our platform goes beyond mere collection; it provides a suite of features designed to decode the essence of conversations, giving you a clearer understanding of the prevailing discourse. Here are three standout features that you'll find indispensable:
Trend Analysis: Monitor the ebb and flow of specific topics over time. For instance, let's explore the trend surrounding the topic "Hawaii" over the past few days.
Trend on “Hawaii” - clearly significant pickup following the Maui fires.
Topic Discovery: Beyond specific keywords, discover overarching themes that your Mastodon community is buzzing about. Our discovery search sifts through recently shared content, presenting you with a cloud visualization of the most frequently used expressions.
Interesting that covid is one of the most discussed topic on August 14th.
Popular Media Tracking: People often share links to articles, videos, and other media that resonate with them. eCairn identifies and aggregates these shared links, highlighting the most popular pieces of content among your chosen audience.
Really interesting to see that (in contrast with X/Twitter) people do provide their own prospective while sharing content.
By integrating these tools, you can cultivate a deeper understanding of your audience's interests, concerns, and shared media preferences, ensuring you remain in sync with the pulse of the Mastodon community.
Want to learn more:
