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This is an excerpt from MarketerHire's weekly newsletter, Raisin Bread. To get a tasty marketing snack in your inbox every week, subscribe here.
Amanda Natividad is VP of marketing for audience research startup SparkToro, and on Twitter, she has a major audience herself.
58K people follow her insights on marketing (and cooking — she’s a trained chef!).
But before our call, she had never used SparkToro’s platform to analyze her Twitter audience.
That’s normal, honestly. Marketers typically use SparkToro for work, to scout out under-the-radar channels their target audience already follows, from niche influencers and podcasts to media outlets (sponcon anyone?).
It’s multipurpose, though. So for this Q+A, we asked Natividad to SparkToro her own account. Here’s what she learned.
Her followers care about email marketing.
The finding: 4.2% of her audience use the phrase “email marketing” frequently.
How SparkToro knows: It crawls her followers’ public social posts for recurring terms.
Why it matters: Amanda hasn’t tweeted much about email marketing, but she knows quite a bit about it. “Maybe it’ll be useful if I share some insights on my newsletter,” she said.
(It’s called The Menu, and hit 2K subscribers in December — despite spending most of its run as a “semi-secret.”)
They listen to startup and growth podcasts.
The finding: Her followers’ favorite podcasts are…
- The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish
- Basecamp’s REWORK podcast
- Masters of Scale
- This Week in Startups
- The Growth Show
How SparkToro knows: “Podcast data is really hard to get,” Natividad said — but SparkToro triangulates, using public signals like who posts about the podcasts, or follows the podcast host and the podcast social accounts.
How she could use it: To pitch herself as a podcast guest, citing SparkToro data to prove audience overlap.
Her first idea: Talking about how she’s grown SparkToro’s Office Hours webinars to 1K guests per event (!) on The Growth Show.
A good chunk have founded their own businesses.
The finding: “Founder” is the most frequently-used word in her followers’ bios — it appears in 8.2% of them.
How SparkToro knows: It crawls her followers’ Twitter bios for recurring words and phrases.
How she could use it: She could post more about founder-relevant concerns or search SparkToro for other accounts founders follow. Then she could build out a rolodex for collaboration opportunities — or competitive analysis. 😈
Our takeaway?
SparkToro can help marketers analyze their employers’ audiences — or their own, if they’re building a personal brand.
And, as Natividad recently pointed out: who isn’t?