SNA and NodeXL for Start-ups: Application on a Language-learning software

SNA and NodeXL for start-ups: Application on a language-learning software. 

How to achieve virality: Lesssons learned from Facebook

SNA can be used to map potential customers and target them directly, or even to do inbound marketing by creating great content interesting for customers to see and then analyzing how virality was achieved. In this blog you’ll learn how to use NodeXL as a strategy to acquire customers for a start-up. Let’s use as an example a new SaaS business consisting of a language-learning software. This industry has several competitors such as Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, Pimsleur, Babbel etc.. How could we steal customers from these companies? Easy, NodeXL allows you to search specific words in twitter and identify important conversations. So, if we wanted to see what people in Twitter are talking about Rosetta Stone we could look up for the word: “Rosetta Stone”, “aprendiendo inglés (learning English)”, “language”, “learning English for business” and any other combination you want to analyze. NodeXL allows you a diversity of features such as:

·         Limit the number of tweets to 1,000 or if the company wants to analyze 300,000 that’s possible too.


·         Look at a specific time zone, this way a company can identify people in the U.S. ,China or in Europe. So if it’s a software is for Spanish speakers living in the U.S or in Latin America you can quickly identify users living in these countries.


·         Look at users that have twitter since 2006. If you analyze users that where the first ones to use twitter they are probably tech-savvy and will be bigger influencers than the ones that joined in 2014.


·         Look at users with more than x amount of followers. When you’re trying to identify big influencers you may want to look at users with more than 1,000 followers.


·         Analyze the content of every tweet. For example, doing the analysis I searched for Rosetta Stone and looked at the tweets. One person tweeted: “TISD teachers are working on becoming bilingual with Rosetta Stone thanks to @TISDFoundation” –tharchar. This information tells me TISDFoundation is investing money in bilingual classes so maybe targeting this foundation would be effective. I also know who to target and I can contact the person that twitter directly.

So continuing with the example of the language-learning software, where could this company start? I did an analysis on NodeXL trying different words on twitter and each analysis gave me an insight on where to begin. Duolingo, a language learning software, and competitor for the language learning software appeared to have two clear clusters when you searched for them on Twitter. 

Turns out an article was published on The Verge, regarding an artificial language from 1887 called Esperanto which is followed by thousands of people in the US, spoken in a notorious group and private clubs and now that language was now available to learn on Duolingo. The article also contained a number of hyperlinks to go to Duolingo’s web site and download the software. This article earned Duolingo thousands of users, since hundreds of people retweeted the article from the Verge. 

What could SNA discovered in this case? An article/blog with great content that appeals to a specific niche is a successful strategy to acquire customers. Also, it’s important that content is good enough. Search engine optimization when well done is fantastic! And the best way to rank well in the Google search results is to create content that is rank-worthy. ( Halligan and Shah p.50).

Duolingo was one of the clusters. They have hundreds of outbound arrows since they're constantly engaging with customers.

The other cluster was Verge.The article was retweeted so many times it ended up acquiring hundreds of customers for

Now, let’s go to a company that began as a simple start-up and used SNA to work its way up.

Facebook is known as the clear example of success thanks to SNA, they recommend you friends by analyzing social networks, and looking at friends of friends that could be interesting to you. However how did they go viral? 

The idea of virality is not a coincidence. Virality can be thoughtfully planned and SNA is the way to plan it. When FB was launched in 2003, the founders decided to focus on a small dense community which was Harvard undergraduates. After they had entered Harvard it expanded to Ivy league schools saturated that market and followed to high schools. What they did is achieve saturation within a community before moving to another community. (p.110 Tsvetovat and Kouznetsov).

The transition from linear propagation to virality. (p.111, Tsvetovat and Kouznetsov)

According to a study by Tsvetovat and Kouznetsov, the transition from linear growth to going viral happens around 7% of density. This means that if 7% of people in your target audience adopt a meme, retweet a video, join the site, share on facebook, comment on your blog or any other social media activity, the rest will follow shortly in a viral way. (P. 112, Tsvetovat and Kouznetsov).

Why is this relevant to start-ups? Entrepreneurs always focus on the overall market, they rarely go for self-contained market niches. However, this theory proves high saturation in a niche is a good starting line to other niches. A niche can be defined by same geographical location, they can unite people by interest. If a company is able to successfully attract a niche whereas it is by inbound marketing, excellent content that is rank worthy, SEO, growth hacking and digital marketing strategies, then they can use SNA to analyze the behavior of that niche and then follow on with the next ones. 

In conclusion, using NodeXL to identify niches and analyze how they interact among themselves is a powerful tool for companies are starting. Also, we now learned from Facebook that saturating a small market and focusing on 7% of the target audience is the start for virality. And a way to lower that percentage to 3 or 4% is creating remarkable content for Google to rank it as worthy material and allow customers to find you organically.

Bibliography:

Tsvetovat, Maksim and Kouznetsov, Alexander. “Social Network Analysis for Startups”. (2011).  Available at: http://mediashow.ru/sites/default/files/books/2011/11/social.network.analysis.for_.startups.1449306462.pdf

 

Dean, Sam “Konstrui Pli Bonan Lingvon (To Build a Better Language)” Available at: http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8672371/learn-esperanto-language-duolingo-app-origin-history

 

NodeXL Analysis 

Halligan, Brian and Shah Dharmesh, “Inbound Marketing. Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online”.