Polygraph mines Facebook Pages for stats on you and competitors

Solving two major social media problems

There are two dramatic problems with digital marketing as it stands today. First, monitoring metrics work well for sites you own, but for social networks like Facebook and Twitter, metrics are nowhere near as useful as they could be and the available tools are enterprise level that cost an arm and a leg. Second, much of today’s interactions on social networks is somewhat insincere.

In an exclusive first look, AGBeat got to take a peek behind the scenes of Polygraph, which seeks to solve both problems presented above by mining public Facebook pages for every social interaction that has occurred, and presents analysis to users in an easy to understand and actionable report. Polygraph was designed “to turn social media measurement into a left-brained, actionable activity.”

Polygraph CEO, Chris Tredaway told us that what passes for expertise today is laughable and that one of the startup’s goals is to “cut through the empty platitudes of social networking.” Immediately upon using the platform, we were stunned at the depth of information that was suddenly available to us at an unprecedented level of detail. Not only could it be useful for our own brand, but for getting detailed insight into competitive brands’ efforts on Facebook at a granular level.

Brief Polygraph overview

The Polygraph story

Polygraph was built by CEO Chris Treadaway, who was a Microsoft Group Product Manager, Web and Social Media Strategy from 2005 to 2008 and in 2010, co-authored Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day and CTO, Robert Starek, three time startup founder, Windows Azure cloud services expert and architect, and owner of 11 patents in big data and data security.

For six months, the team meticulously built Polygraph and it is important to note that the product is a data mining platform – they are not using the Facebook API which is traditionally used to regurgitate publicly available information to unsuspecting buyers. The Polygraph product is extremely sophisticated and built entirely on Microsoft’s cloud services – Windows Azure. They soft launched the product in November 2011 and will be launching to the public later this month.

Treadaway told us that Polygraph is currently being used by a “number of top tier agencies, who are blown away by it.” He added that the product works as well for small companies and properties as it does large.

Exclusive sneak peek:

Already becoming known in some circles as the Compete.com for Facebook, users can analyze their own pages, competitor pages, or get a comparison report. For as little as $99, anyone can get a report on their competitor, which we suspect will be the company’s strongest suit – private reconnaissance.

Below are dozens of data visualizations that will be available when Polygraph launches, and the company says they will continue to improve and add to future versions of the product (and some of these may be altered prior to the public release):

• Overview
• Fans
• Admin posts
• User posts
• Post likes
• Comment likes
• Unique contributors
• Engagement per fan
• Comments per admin post
• Likes per admin post
• Active fan%
• Best day to post
• Worst day to post
• Fans over time
• Fans added per day
• Performance
• Likes per post
• Comments per post
• Active fan %
• Engagement per fan
• Actions
• Admin posts over time
• Admin posts weekdays
• Admin posts hourly
• Outcomes (broken down by user posts and user comments)
• Daily post effectiveness
• Engagement by day of week
• Engagement by hour
• Weekly engagement levels
• Monthly engagement levels
• Daily engagement levels
• Daily by content type
• Top Content (broken down by likes, comments and comment likes)
• Top Fans (broken down by likes, posts, comments and comment likes)
• Tag Cloud

To give you a taste of the Polygraph visualizations, below are basic overview results for (a) our Facebook Page and (b) comparing Keller Williams, RE/MAX and Century 21’s corporate Facebook Pages (click to enlarge):