DataSift offers first analysis at scale of how LinkedIn’s members engage with content

As a huge network of professionals, LinkedIn provides 80 percent of all social media leads for B2B marketers.

To help reach these audiences, data intelligence firm DataSift announced this week a new service that analyzes the topics and kinds of content that most interest specific job holders among LinkedIn’s 467 million members.

This new LinkedIn Engagement Insights, DataSift says, is the first such offering at scale. It utilizes DataSift’s Pylon social analytics platform to deliver insights for finding audiences, boosting a brand or improving content for ad planning and content marketing. DataSift says it is the only strategic data provider for LinkedIn, and this is its first partnership with the social network.

The platform employs artificial intelligence to sift content for topics, companies and products, and to analyze clicks, impressions, likes and comments.

Typical use cases, DataSift CEO Tim Barker told me, might be finding out what kind of content most engages VPs of sales in the US.

Or the service might be used to tune content, such as discovering whether a How To guide about CRMs is downloaded by more salespeople than an Overview document on the same subject. The analysis can also be used to compare, say, your How To guide on CRMs with your competitors’.

The resulting data, aggregated and anonymized, is then noted by a marketer and separately used for ad/marketing targeting with LinkedIn’s own tools. You might, for instance, decide to send a How To guide on CRMs to all VPs of sales in New England, if they seem to be most engaged with that kind of content.

DataSift does not offer its own dashboard, but makes the data available via an API to its partners, such as ad platform Brand Networks or the ad/marketing agency group WPP.

But DataSift did provide us with a couple of prototype screens, showing how this data might be presented:

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.