SparkToro Review | Find influencers in the cloud industry

What SparkToro does:

SparkToro provides audience intelligence on topics, social accounts, website followings and hashtags. The intelligence is gathered from social platforms, website audience, podcasts and Youtube.

What SparkToro doesn’t do:

I started by looking to see if SparkToro can help with making a decision such as whether to launch a podcast on Spotify or SoundCloud. In other words, do Spotify and Soundcloud have different types of audience? Are these audiences going to click with the podcast content creators provide?

I emailed Rand Fishkin, the founder of SparkToro who has kindly provided the reviewer access, and asked him about whether SparkToro is the right platform to evaluate which platform the artist should use to launch the podcast. Rand has given me a very good answer I’d like to share with you.

“If someone’s choosing between which platforms to launch on, SparkToro’s, unfortunately, not going to be very helpful. That’s not really why we exist or a question/use-case we’re trying to answer. SparkToro instead might help that artist discover where their audience already pays attention so they can reach that group and attempt to grow their listeners/subscribers. For example, if the podcast is focused on digital illustration, they might search for an audience that frequently talks about digital illustration and see that a guest editorial on some of the listed publications (Behance or Creative Review or the like) or an appearance on the already-popular YouTube channels (Design Milk, Computer Arts, etc) and podcasts (Visual Storytelling, Creators Chat) could be a wise marketing investment. They might see some popular social accounts with that group (Ian McQue or Ramin Nasibov) and decide to invite those folks onto their podcast as guests. They could look at words and phrases that the group uses to describe themselves or other topics of interest to determine the topics of upcoming shows.” — Rand Fishkin

So, Instead of giving a high-level suggestion of which platform to use, Is SparkToro capable of providing more in-depth audience insights? I developed the following questions in mind for reviewing SparkToro.

Questions:

1. Is the database big enough to reflect insights?
2. Do the insights reflect the truth?
3. How can I act on these insights?

I’m interested in finding out what insights SparkToro can provide for the topic Cloud, social account Satya Nadella, website cio.com and hashtags #devops. Although the topics seem a bit random, the common theme is the IT industry.

I’ll walk you through the platform in this short 5 minutes’ video for those interested in seeing how the feature looks.

My Audience Frequently Talks about Cloud:

Sparktoro provided me with the insights on 250 websites, 70 Youtube channels, 251 social channels who have at least 7000 followers and 54 podcast recommendations.

Check out this video: https://share.vidyard.com/watch/w6NwWwrCyyDt458zisSRfi?

You can PM me for detailed Insights and I’ll send you the slides.

Get intel about people that follow/visit/share the Tweets of Satya Nadella:

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft Corporation, publishes 26 posts every month on average. His account is considered highly engaged with an engagement score of 72/100.

The top 5 frequently used words in bios of the followers are Microsoft (3.0%), data (2.1%), cloud (1.8 %), product (1.7%), innovation (1.6%).

The top 5 websites frequented by his followers are msft.social (6.7%), microsoft.com (6.3%), hindustantimes.com (5.1%), economictimes.indiatimes.com (4.7%), thehindu.com (4.6%).

In addition to the insight above, Sparktoro also provides intelligence on words frequently used in shares, city-level geographic distribution, and other social accounts frequented.

In all honesty, since the percentages above are all low, this most likely means Satya has diversified followings.

Have you always thought the audience that visits www.cio.com are all CIOs? Think again:

SparkToro’s database has found a large audience that behaves moderately diverse — 70,444 sources that visit cio.com. SparkToro is highly confident in its representation.

In the Audience Insights report, the most frequently used hashtags in shares and content are #cybersecurity (19%), #digitaltransformation (19%), #machinelearning (17%), #analytics(16%), #cio (11%), #artificialintelligence (10%), #datascience (10%), #devops (8.3%).

Other than cio.com, the audience also frequent the following websites: Techrepublic.com (22.6%), Networkworld.com (15.4%), Computerweekly.com (15%) and so on.

On social platforms, the audience also follow Gartner (28%), CIO.com (25%), Forrester.com (23%), VentureBeat.con (14%) and so on.

The topic of podcasts is a very interesting one. We all know. It’s incredibly hard to surface great podcasts on Google, Apple, Spotify unless you know 100% what brands and keywords you’re searching for. Otherwise, it takes s hearty Google search.

The most frequented podcasts are All CNET Audio Podcasts (13%), McKinsey Quarterly Audio (8%), Read. Write. Repeat: a podcast for readers, writers, thinkers, and dreamers (7%) — (This podcast’s name is long…), Sales Pipeline Raido (6%).

Where do the 38,004 sources who use the hashtag #devops consume content?

The top 5 websites they frequently visit are Aws.Amazon.com (13.8%), Dzone.com (12.2%), Cio.com (10.5%), Infoq.com (9.7%) and Techrepublic.com (9.3%).

They listen to podcasts PodCTL — Enterprise Kubernetes (19%), On. Net — Channel 9, JavaScript — Software Engineering Daily (7%), DevOps Radio (5%), All CNET Audio Podcasts (5%). It’s an interesting comparison to see to the percentage difference between the #devops audience and cio.com audience. CNET Audio Podcasts is the most frequented by cio.com audience.

The other hashtags they use the most are #agile (20%), #aws (17%), #docker (17%), #kubernetes (15%), #machinelearning (13%), #azure (12%), #cybersecurity (11%) and #opensource (11%).

Which cloud provider’s Youtube has the highest Engagement score:

Hint: It’s not your household name cloud provider.

In this brief research, IBM Cloud shows the highest engagement score of 42. It could be the company is using Youtube as a central hub for video distribution. I couldn’t help but had a quick look at Dynatrace. Dynatrace is not a cloud provider but I’m interested in finding out what’s the engagement score.

Microsoft Cloud

Google Cloud Platform

Amazon Web Services

IBM Cloud

Dynatrace

What SparkToro could improve on?

I’m sure SparkToro would be a mythical beast! After all, it’s a tool that just launched a week ago.

• Insights on specific social channel profile, e.g Satya Nadella’s LinkedIn profiles, what LinkedIn groups
• More country specific insights — I’m based in Sydney Australia — When I filter down to country level, SparkToro didn’t provide as many sources.
• Deep dive into third party collaboration opportunities. Sparktoro offers deep insights and comparison, and sets great directions for PR, having the third party highlighted can more easily reveal opportunities.

In a summary, SparkToro has provided great insights on those who are interested in cloud, cio.com, Satya Nadella and #devops. To act on these insights, I’m going to take a deep dive into the different publications IT personas are into and use the popular related hashtags that Satya also uses in my next social post.

Thanks for your read! Your attention is appreciated in this noisy world. Let me know what you think about SparkToro!

Lucy Xu

Tech Marketer

LinkedIn