Comparisons: A Quick Guide
Audience overlap, growth tracking, industry audience reports, and much much more!
By now, you now have a few different tools from Surf Analytics that you’ve put to good use:
- A follower report you can segment and analyze
- Monthly refreshes populating in your account
- A saved search query to easily filter your audience
- A list of profiles you sourced through Instagram Cerebro who you want to target for follower growth
Now we’re going to put it all together using Comparisons!
Intro To Comparisons
"Find profiles that are in"
Place two or more segments to see the overlap across segments:
Example — Adding the NBA follower report and the NFL report into this section will allow me to see the fan overlap across these two leagues.
"Find profiles that are not in"
Place a segment in here to exclude the followers in a list or follower report, for example to isolate profiles who follow one brand, but not another.
Example — To see who follows Puma, but doesn't follow Nike.
Finding Audience Overlap
Use this workflow to get a list of profiles who follow two or more accounts!
Possible use cases for this workflow include:
- Follower overlap between your brand and a competitor's
- Follower overlap between your brand and an influencer you're working with (to maximize their reach)
We can approach this in two ways:
To simply find audience overlap, place the two Reports into the "Find profiles that are in" column in the Compare dropdown:
If you're thinking of working with a potential brand partner, and they send you a JSON file (in the case you're running a comparison on Instagram reports) or start to upload their own data, a more effective comparison to test the potential reach of your partnership is to see how much of their audience does not already follow you.
The key in this use case is to find partners who are aligned with your brand, but don't share the same audience.
In this example, Surf is determining how much of Dwayne Johnson's audience they can reach by looking at a list of followers who follow PLAYR.gg but don't yet follow Surf:
The larger this list, the more advantageous this partnership can be, especially if there are valuable profiles in this list.
Tracking Follower Growth and Losses with Historical Report Data
This is a great tool for users who want to keep track of new influential followers and capitalize on opportunities in a timely way.
To track follower growth, as well as lost follower data over time, you should first establish a regular cadence of refreshes! This accumulates historical report data over time, and shows up in the top left-hand corner of your dashboard:
Once you have accumulated at least two reports, you can start to track and isolate your newest followers from one report to the next, like in this example with the tequila brand Teremana:
Following the logic of the Compare Dropdown, you can see that we're finding profile who appear in the latest refresh of Teremana's report, who do not appear in the earlier version- this will isolate all the profiles who have followed Teremana since Feb 5, 2020.
Conversely, you can see a list of followers you lost by flipping the two reports so that you look followers who appear in the earlier refresh, but not in the newest version.
Total Audience Reach
It's easy to see valuable profiles who are engaging in your industry's space by creating industry reports.
Use our Market Intelligence Audience Library to see total audience reach across multiple brands (up to 150 at a time).
For example, if I'm an athleisure brand, I can look at the total audience reach across Lululemon, Alo Yoga, and Gymshark by placing all of those reports together and selecting "any":
Highly Aligned Profiles
Find profiles who are primed for engagement with your brand by searching for highly aligned profiles. Using the same example of an athleisure brand, find profiles who follow all three brands, or at least 2/3, who will be more likely to engage with your content:
— All —
— At Least —
