SparkToro Blog

Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Data Marketing Product SparkToro

How to Apply SparkToro’s Data and Get Better Marketing Results

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Updated April 3, 2024: We relaunched SparkToro! This blog post has been updated to reflect our product’s current functionalities. In 2018, my cofounder, Casey, and I had a crazy idea: what if you could aggregate the behavior of tens of millions of public social profiles and get insights into how groups of people behave online? What if you could build…
Data Product SparkToro

Election Polls vs. Results Can Help Explain How SparkToro’s Data Works

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the last 48 hours frantically refreshing the NYTimes, Politico, the Washington Post, Five Thirty Eight, & Memeorandum far more times than is healthy. This American election, more than any news event in my lifetime, has induced massive anxiety, fear, hope, and emotional turmoil (at least in those who understand how systems influence behavior…
Data Product Psychology SparkToro

Analyze Your Audience’s Political & Media Behavior in SparkToro

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In our ongoing quest to provide unique, valuable audience intelligence, we’re launching a brand new feature in SparkToro today: Media and Political Insights. You’ll find this data available in the Audience Insights section of any SparkToro search. Any timing of this release with major, upcoming political events is purely coincidental… 😉 ABOVE: Media and Politics Insights for users of the…
Hiring Marketing Psychology Startups Team

Why You Should Hire Agencies & Consultants (for everything you can)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In my first decade as a tech CEO, I consistently got advice about how building a great team was essential to building a great business. Agencies and consultants were never part of this conversation. It was always: hire full-time employees in areas where you need a competitive advantage; only hire agencies for functions you want to put on autopilot or…
Book Hiring Moz Personal

I’m Ending My Tenure on Moz’s Board & Welcoming Tara Reed and Asia Orangio

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The short, short version: After stepping down as CEO in 2014 and leaving the company in 2018, as of a signature earlier today, I’m officially off Moz’s board of directors. The incredibly impressive CEO & founder of DemandMaven, Asia (Matos) Orangio accepted my offer to fill the chairperson seat. Simultaneously, I nominated Apps Without Code‘s extraordinary founder and CEO, Tara…
Marketing Product SparkToro

Six Ways SparkToro’s Early Customers Use Our Product

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Tl;DR: SparkToro’s early customers include a mix of agencies, independent consultants, and in-house marketers whose work involves Digital PR, Social Media+Content Marketing, Market Research, Digital Advertising, Audience Building, and/or Creative/Brand Marketing. Clicking those will take you to the accompanying section of this post with use-cases and examples. This has been a hard year for everyone. The pandemic’s separated us from…
Product SparkToro

New Feature Alert: Email + Contact Info Are Now In SparkToro

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Since launch in April, showing emails and contact information inside the SparkToro app has been our most requested feature. Today, it’s here. Billions of email addresses and social contact URLs now pull directly into the Lists feature. If you’ve used SparkToro Lists in the past (and have a Standard or higher tier account), your Lists have already been updated to…
Psychology Startups

We’ve Gotta Stop Using “Lifestyle Business” as a Pejorative

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For a long while, American business culture has worshiped at the altar of big. Entrepreneurs want to build “big” companies, because they believe that’s how they prove their worth. The media tells us that’s true when they report on every move made by big companies, but barely cover small ones. Speakers on stages and webinars reinforce it when they talk…
Marketing Psychology

Outreach Tips (better than anything you’ll find searching Google)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s 2020, so your inboxes probably look like mine. Bloated with requests from people you don’t know, overrun by low-quality spammers, a bubbling morass of bandwidth-consuming time vampires mixed in with people and sources you actually *want* to hear from, forcing you to pan for gold amidst the sans serif grays and post-modern white of your mail provider’s “productivity-centric” user…

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