If you want to find out who your top fans are on Facebook there are a few ways I know of, off the top of my head, that you can get that information (though the results will be different for each approach/platform as the measurements are different, and therefore, the results often are).

Sysomos has  a fan page profile tool for a while now, occasionally I have used it, and it can pick out your most active fans on Facebook.  The problem (or Catch 22) is Sysomos can only process a certain amount of information about a Fan page at a time, and a really active brand, say, the Occupy Wall Street page on Facebook, doesn’t get all the information processed.

It’s a curious thing, but for a variety of reasons, platforms have limitations on their performance that profoundly impact how powerful and useful they can ultimately be, and this is one case of that issue. It doesn’t really matter if I put in one day, one week or one month of time into Sysomos, the same top fans show up because all Sysomos can  handle is 500 posts a day on a fan page.  Still, that is better than nothing.

But it also illustrates a bind that social analytics platforms have gotten themselves into – remember that many of these platforms charge a premium price for the use of their services, and yet, for whatever reasons (valid or not) such as API limitations, or limits on what Facebook will supply in a fetch of information about a Brand fan page, the information is so limited as to be almost useless for any serious examination of top fans, in this case (after all, if your only going to look at the last 500 or so posts to a  fan page, and your getting 10,000 a day, or whatever it is , how much can you really tell about the top fans)?

We see it not only here, but with most of the other platforms I examine in my book – as more people use these platforms they’re frustrated at the limitations they have painted themselves into, it’s as if the demand for data has out grown the serious uses for which clients now need the information for – as no one can argue with me that I needed more than 500 of the most recent posts to find out who the top fans for Occupy Wall Street are – yet Sysomos, or Radian6, or half a dozen others, while charging premium prices, can’t deliver the full data needed.

I don’t fault Sysomos for this, I don’t fault Radian6 for their limitations, or any one else – I just say it to point out the very real problem  anyone who is serious about capturing the data needed for a “full analysis” is going to run into when they try to do it.   As time goes on, it’s becoming more obvious that platform vendors have drastically underestimated the needs of their users, both in user interface architecture ( query length) and in the breadth of data they can fetch and process without slowing down to a crawl (which is happening already way too often).

And if I’m a special case, pushing these systems harder than most users do, how come everyone else I come across  complains about slow performance, across the board, for all the Social Analytics platforms when anyone tries to do serious work with them?  It can’t just be me – lots of people are having problems like I’m having, they just haven’t got the benefit of a blog and audience to voice them, like I do (or the understanding that this wasn’t what they thought was going to happen when they tried doing serious analytics work with the platform).

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On a more sunny note, another thing Sysomos does, which I had not noticed before, is publish the most recent posts on the facebook wall, except for one thing, it picks out positive and negative sentiment paragraphs and flags them so the user can see them when looking in Sysomos at the content.
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There are other ways to find Top Fans, such as Infinigraph, but the model is much more behavioral (based on sharing behavior) than what Sysomos provides.

Finally, there is a nice “buzz map” Sysomos creates around each query you run and an overall summary of sentiment – here’s the buzz map for the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page:
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I suppose it’s a mute point to define what is really “negative” vs. “positive” here, given the nature of the subject and strong feelings people have about it.

By the way, I wondered if we’re covering all the different locations where local rallies are happening – apparently not, based on what I’m seeing – a pity.

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While seeing all the events above, it’s hard to write a search query for Sysomos that covers them all – but I managed to do that, at least, attempt it.

occupy AND protest AND (1% OR “1 percent”)

While it would be nice to get the location where conversations are happening the most to be provided by Sysomos, in reality, the platform really makes it a lot harder than it should be to search locations and come up with anything meaningful here, though overall, the use of Sysomos for this work is a no-brainer.

I’m very tired and my eyes are closing so I’ll end the post now.

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