SparkToro Blog

Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Data Marketing

2018 Search Market Share: Myths vs. Realities of Google, Bing, Amazon, Facebook, DuckDuckGo, & More

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For many years, there have been pervasive myths about where Americans search on the web, whether search is dying, whether Amazon (or Facebook, or Bing) is taking Google’s market share, and plenty more. Thanks to new data generously compiled for SparkToro from Jumpshot, a clickstream data provider that monitors more than 10 million desktop and mobile devices in the US,…
Data

We Analyzed Every Twitter Account Following Donald Trump: 61% Are Bots, Spam, Inactive, or Propaganda

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last week, SparkToro launched our third free tool, a service that analyzes Twitter accounts to estimate what percent of their followers are bots, spam, propaganda, or inactive accounts. By far the account that’s been most checked by users of the tool is @realdonaldtrump. Since there’s great interest in that account, we decided to expand our usual sample analysis (which looks…
Data Events Marketing

On SERP SEO – The Infuriating Reality of Search’s Future

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last week, I was invited to give the closing talk at Brighton SEO, one of the SEO field’s most well-attended events. The host, Kelvin Newman, was gracious, thoughtful, and personally still runs much of the event’s operations, giving it a truly special, authentic, non-corporate feel. My presentation centered on the shift in Google’s behavior over the last few years away…
Data Marketing Product SparkToro

SparkToro’s New Tool to Uncover Real vs. Fake Followers on Twitter

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
On our journey to creating a great search tool for audience intelligence, we realized that the data we use to measure influence is fatally flawed in a number of ways. Our SparkScore tool was built to help measure true engagement+reach (as opposed to mere following). But the other big problem is fake followers — accounts that exist on Twitter, technically…
Startups

The Powerhouses of the Internet Are Turning Hostile to Websites

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Perhaps this was inevitable. In a system that encourages monopolies, and demands those monopolies increase growth rate and extract ever more revenue (sans caveats or exceptions), we probably shouldn’t be surprised. But, we should be prepared. Google is referring less outgoing traffic to websites for the first time in its 17 year history (at least in the US, where its…
Marketing

You’ve Got Product/Market Fit… What About Marketing/Market Fit?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
You’ve just been asked to take over the marketing strategy for a new company that makes innovative, high end restaurant equipment. They need their brand and message to reach chefs and owners of independent restaurants. What’s your process? If you’re a smart, responsible, thoughtful marketer, you’ll do something like this: Step One: Figure out what chefs + restauranters pay attention…
Events Startups

My Presentation from INBOUND 2018 Might Make You a Better Entrepreneur

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last week, I spoke at Hubspot’s INBOUND conference for the eighth year. For the first time, it was not under the auspices of my old company, Moz, nor was it centrally about web marketing. Instead, I focused on my experiences building a company and helping other entrepreneurs build their companies…. And I think, this was one of the best received…
Startups

A New, Free Tool to Determine the True Influence of a Twitter Account

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Number of followers is a crap metric. And yet, as I’ve been watching and learning from folks who do content marketing, PR-focused outreach, social media marketing, and influencer campaigns, I’ve found that more than 90% of the time… that’s *exactly* what people use. They’ll nod their heads and say “yeah, I know it can be gamed,” or “yeah, some people…
SparkToro Startups

SparkToro Raised a Very Unusual Round of Funding & We’re Open-Sourcing Our Docs

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The Short Version Our new company, SparkToro, LLC has just completed a $1.3mm angel financing. And, because we think our structure might be right for many other businesses, we’re making our documents open-source for anyone to use. The Story SparkToro is, obviously, a product of my and my cofounder, Casey‘s, experiences in the mostly venture-backed worlds of software startups. The…

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