Author Segments is Meltwater's new audience discovery tool.
What is Meltwater Author Segments?
Author Segments is a social listening segmentation, or audience discovery tool that separates social authors into meaningful segments. Author Segments helps marketers deepen their understanding of existing audiences and identify new ones. Importantly, Author Segments compliments how you currently use Explore for Social Listening.
Explore offers conversational analytics on what people are talking about. It also offers Channel analytics to understand where they're talking about topics. Author Segments completes the circle, and provides audience Analytics to deepen the understanding of who is talking.
Watch the instructional video below
How is the Data Collected?
Author Segments uses Radarly author's database to return information about each segment (Radarly is a separate Meltwater product). Each influential Twitter author has a variety of attributes assigned to them, that we then use to aggregate the overall analytics in Author Segments. These attributes include demographics (ex. age, gender, location), and interests (ex. topics, professions). Influential Twitter authors are defined as those with over 250 followers.
Radarly extracts and infers this information by looking at the authors' Twitter bios and recent tweets.
How do I Create an Author Segments Dashboard?
So how do you actually run an author segments report? In one of two ways.
Via the Navigation
Click on Author Segments in the left-hand navigation.
This will open the Author Segments landing page where you will see a list of all existing Author Segments dashboards, along with the ability to create a new Input or Compare dashboard.
Click "Create Input dashboard" to start a new author segment dashboard. Enter a name for this dashboard, select dashboard type (saved search or twitter followers), select a saved search, and select a date range to generate your Author Segments dashboard. Click save.
In Explore
In Explore, after you run a search, open the Authors tab. At the top you will find a banner that reads Find and understand relevant Twitter communities and authors. Create Community Dashboard.
Click Create Author Segments Dashboard. Enter a name for this report, select a saved search, and select a date range to generate your Author Segments dashboard.
To view the results of your newly created author segments dashboard, or any previously saved author segments dashboards, click on the name of the author segments dashboard in the table.
How do I Create a Compare Dashboard?
Compare in Author Segments features the ability to directly compare up to five (5) saved Author Segments dashboards side-by-side, or uncover shared and differing aspects between two dashboards with Overlap and Difference.
Click Create under "Compare dashboard"
Select your Compare type in the subsequent pop-up. The options are Side-by-side, and Overlap and Difference.
Options:
Side-by-side: Compare up to five saved Author Segments dashboards (Explore search or Twitter Follower analysis dashboards) in a side-by-side view
Overlap and Difference: Uncover shared and different aspects between two dashboards; featuring three columns:
Overlap: showing what is common between the two audiences
Difference 1: shows what is in dashboard 1, that is not present in dashboard 2
Difference 2: shows what is in dashboard 2, that is not present in dashboard 1
3. Select "Compare" to create report.
Side-by-side
Compare up to five saved Author Segments dashboards (Explore search or Twitter Follower analysis dashboards) in a side-by-side view, across all four tabs in Author Segments.
Overlap and Difference
Uncover shared and different aspects between two dashboards; featuring three columns:
Difference 1: shows what is in dashboard 1, that is not present in dashboard 2
Difference 2: shows what is in dashboard 2, that is not present in dashboard 1
Overlap: showing what is common between the two audiences
What is Twitter Follower Analysis?
Twitter Follower Analysis makes Author Segments more accessible and usable to you, by allowing you to launch a dashboard just by punching in a Twitter handle, with no need for boolean, to analyze a handle’s followers.
From the Author Segments homepage:
Select Create Dashboard
Under Dashboard type select Twitter followers
The dashboard functions the same way as saved searches.
How do I Read the Author Segments Dashboard?
The Communities Report consists of four tabs: Overview, Segments, Authors, and Ad Targeting.
Overview
The Overview tab displays high-level metrics pertaining to the makeup of your author segments. The number of available topics is1072. Topics are presented in the Relevance Rank, Author Segments, and Top Topics widgets.
Metrics include:
Relevance rank - Ranking of author segments and sub-segments based on their relevance to your results. This widget features two drill-down options:
Click the topic wheel icon to update the topic wheel to zoom into this segment
Click the segment name to open the tweets from this segment in the slide-out
Author Segments Topic Wheel Categories - Groups influential authors (greater than 250 followers) into top-level and sub-level communities. Hover and click to drill in.
Top Topics - The most common topics identified in tweets and bios of community authors.
Top Authors - Top authors based on follower count.
Top Author Locations - Author locations most frequently appearing in results inferred from author bios.
Top Occupations - Breakdown of the author's occupations inferred from their bios.
Demographic overview - Breakdown of the most common demographic groups of the selected segment's author.
Bio keywords - The most frequent terms and hashtags in author bios.
Age/gender - Breakdown of inferred ages and genders of the selected segment's authors.
Use the Segments Filter at the top to update the results, drilling into specific segments and sub-segments. Changing your selection here will update the subsequent results in the report. Note you can also narrow in on segments based on Age, Gender, Location, and Tier.
Segments
This tab displays each segment at a high level for easy overview, exploration, and segmentation.
Use the Segments Filter at the top to update the results, drilling into specific segments and sub-segments. Changing your selection here will update the subsequent segments shown in the tab.
From each segment, you can add the list of all authors to an existing or new author list by clicking the silhouette in the top right-hand corner.
At the bottom of each segment, are buttons to View Authors and View Tweets.
Click "View Tweets" to open tweets in side panel.
Click "View Authors" to open the Authors tab.
Authors
The Authors tab displays each individual author of the select segment or sub-segement. Authors are ranked by authority score.
Use the Segments Filters at the top to update the results, drilling into specific segments and sub-segments. Changing your selection here will update the subsequent authors shown in the tab.
Each author card will display the name, handle name, bio, followers, following, and tweets count, as well as authority score. This allows you to see the individual people that make up the select segment or sub-segment.
Use the checkbox on each author card to select and add authors to a new or existing author list.
Ad Targeting
The Ad Targeting tab provides insight into the Top Countries, Age, Gender, and Top Interests for your select author segment. Click Download file for an Excel file that includes the tabsCountries, Twitter, YouTube, Google Ads & DSPs. Use these to upload and target on social channels.
FAQs
Are there any limits to the number of author segment dashboards that can be generated?
No, there aren't currently any limits.
How long does an author segment dashboard take to generate?
They typically generate in less than one minute but depending on the size and frequency of your reports, they may take a little longer.
Can I generate a shareable dashboard or export data to CSV from Author Segments?
Yes! For a shareable dashboard, all eight widgets from the Overview tab are included. A CSV download option is also been included for the Author Segments and Authors tabs.
Where do the topics and professions information come from?
The Radarly data model infers these insights from the content of the Twitter author bios and tweets from the individual authors.
Are authors limited to a single interest area?
No, authors may fall under multiple interests.
Do the results stay the same when I generate an author segment?
No, the author segment is dynamic. This means that if you reopen the author segment dashboard on a different day, we will refresh the data, so new author segments may be added and some may be removed.
How many author segment members do we analyze at one time?
We analyze up to 100,000 community members from your search, based on the ones with the most followers.
How many author segment members can we add to an author list at one time?
The limit is currently 500 members, however, we are planning to increase that limit soon.
💡 Tip
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