SparkToro Blog

Data Marketing Product SparkToro

Which Subreddits Does Your Audience Follow? What Do They Talk About? Starting Today, SparkToro Has the Answers

Today, we’re launching a new “Reddit” tab in SparkToro. It will show you the Subreddits to which the audience you search for most-heavily subscribes, and the text content of their Reddit posts. This feature is briefly available for all paid subscribers. In a few weeks, SparkToro is updating our prices & packages, at which time it will be exclusive to…
Events Marketing SparkToro

Introducing SparkTogether 2022: Because the Marketing World Needs Better, More Unique Events

On November 10th, we’re running SparkToro’s first-ever marketing summit: SparkTogether. It’s live. It WON’T be recorded (because our presenters are sharing confidential numbers and information). And we’d love to have you there. For details and tickets, check out the SparkTogether 2022 Event Page, or read on for more background. Early bird tickets are on sale until Oct. 8, then prices…

The Episodic Content Creator’s Guide to Using SparkToro

Last Saturday, I received an email from Rich Wilan, founder of Fascinate Productions. Rich and his team help podcast creators build audiences and top charts, and they’re very good at their work, helping clients like Zoe: Science & Nutrition, Startup Dads, A Cuppa Happy (and more) launch, grow, and reach chart-topping numbers. Rich kindly gave me permission to make my…

Google, Apple, and Amazon Stifle Innovation When They Favor Their Own Products

The SparkToro team got an exciting surprise on Sunday evening: a mention of our research on Last Week Tonight by John Oliver. The full episode, Big Tech Monopolies, is available on YouTube. It covers an issue I’ve railed against before, but with a heightened sense of urgency: there is actually a bipartisan bill in Congress that might fix this. Thankfully,…

SparkToro’s Mission, Vision, and Values: BELUX

Those skilled in the art of BS detection can tell you that 99% of company mission, vision, and values statements are meaningless. For corporate ideals to be more than just blatant-hypocrisy-in-poster-form, leadership has to build them into the company’s operating systems: how they hire/fire/promote, how they prioritize product investments, treat customers, make decisions around funding and acquisitions, and more. Even…
Data

SparkToro & Followerwonk Joint Twitter Analysis: 19.42% of Active Accounts Are Fake or Spam

TL;DR – From May 13-15, 2022, SparkToro and Followerwonk conducted a rigorous, joint analysis of five datasets including a variety of active (i.e. tweeting) and non-active accounts. The analysis we believe to be most compelling uses 44,058 public Twitter accounts active in the last 90 days. These accounts were randomly selected, by machine, from a set of 130+ million public,…
SparkToro Startups Team

SparkToro’s Year 2 Retrospective: Can Chill Work, Alternative Funding, and an Indie Approach Scale?

Two years ago today, at the nerve-wracking start of a global pandemic, we launched SparkToro. Since then, we’ve learned a lot, and uncovered plenty of unanswered questions, too. As is tradition, I’ll try to share the good, the bad, and the interesting in the hopes it can help other entrepreneurs, especially those considering an alternative to standard, venture-backed funding. First,…

Provable Marketing Attribution is a Boondoggle; Trust Your Gut Instead

You’ve heard the marketing analytics spiel before. It goes something like: Marketing journeys are long, complicated, multi-channel paths. Tracking them is always imperfect, but if you employ an extensive, expensive, difficult-to-configure combination of tools, tracking systems, and deeply talented statistics professionals, you can build a high-quality, predictive attribution modeling structure that approximates reality with relatively minor gaps. My counterpoint: don’t…

What Your Marketing Needs is a Bad Guy

If you’re a big brand, already established, conservative in your ways and happy with your performance, this advice isn’t for you. But, if you’re a startup, an underdog, a challenger, you need to hear this. Villains are a good thing. Stories with villains make sense. They can be memorable. They can have depth and purpose. Stories without villains are meandering,…