Market Experience of Creating a Platform for Analysing Blogger Accounts and Their Audience

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to structure the experience of developing a tool for analysing bloggers and their audiences on social media. The paper presents the main stages of creating this tool: starting with interviews with potential clients for planning functionality and going up to a conceptual model, data processing methods, and its perspectives. A series of interviews (N = 20) showed that approaches to analysing the audience of bloggers in the advertising market vary in their depth depending on the tasks. Bloggers' accounts were assessed both in terms of quantitative indicators (size of the audience) and qualitative ones, i.e., in terms of compliance with the brand image. Audience indicators were of interest for business development. The model for describing users of a social media (and therefore for audiences) has developed from three components: the content of the account itself, the content of its audience, and the content of other accounts with which it interacts. The processing of the data set required technical solutions based on machine learning for the analysis of texts and images. As a result, the authors obtained both sets of classic indicators (gender, age, geographic location) and a vector representation of the behavioral characteristics of the audience. The further development of technology will probably lead to a decrease in the ability to independently analyse social media. Social media restricts access to APIs, increasing the cost of developing solutions, and legislation in the field of personal data increases the risks for companies creating new products in this sector.