Marketing firm Alterian uses Gnip to Collect Data for their Social Media Marketing Product

Alterian's comprehensive marketing services range from campaign management and email marketing to—you guessed it—social media marketing. Aaron Newman, Vice President of Product Marketing for Social Media at Alterian, knows social media is an indicator of brand health and a channel for sales growth. "You know they're talking about you out there," he says. "You want to know who they are, when they're talking about you, and what they're saying about you."

Aaron's entire department is devoted to providing social media monitoring and engagement tools to Alterian's customers. His team has to get it right. And so, Aaron uses Gnip to collect data from some of the most popular social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Back before Aaron and his team came across Gnip, they were collecting data from those social media sources on their own. "We were getting the data, but not nearly as robustly as we wanted," Aaron explains. "We wanted to get as much content as possible. We needed the best in the industry."

Aaron came across Gnip online. He started with a Twitter feed, attempting to collect as many tweets as he could through the Gnip platform. "We already had our own Twitter collector that was somewhat similar to what Gnip does," Aaron elaborates. "We would spend 20 to 40 hours a month maintaining and managing it. Now we spend two or three hours a month, just checking in on it."

Aaron's team's time is precious. "Whatever we can outsource or get someone else to work on frees us up to do analysis or build on top of the data. Outsourcing social media data collection makes a lot more sense than us taking our limited resources and trying to manage everything."

The Gnip team was able to help Aaron ramp up their data acquisition very quickly and facilitate the collection of more data than his team could retrieve on their own. "What would have taken us weeks to figure out, the Gnip team could help us do in a couple hours. Switching to Gnip meant we spent less time, but saw a lot more results. Moving to Gnip tripled our volume of Twitter results immediately. Nowadays we're seeing 5x the volume we were getting on our own."

In closing, Aaron asks, "Why would you spend all that money to build your own expertise when there's a whole team of people working on it already?" In his experience, it's a lot more cost effective to work with somebody who's already got the social media data collection expertise. "Gnip is a great service," he says, "and it's easy to reach all the right people. Everyone there has been great."

Thanks, Aaron! It's been great working with you, too.