SocialRank, the startup that helps users find their most valuable Twitter followers, is launching version 2.0 today, which significantly expands what you can learn on the service.
The company started out in 2012 as a side project for co-founders Alex Taub and Michael Schonfeld, but they recently left payment startup Dwolla to resurrect the product and focus on it full-time. (They also raised $1 million in seed funding.) <a href=”http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/13/socialrank-raises-1m/“>The relaunched version focused on three main areas — your most engaged followers (i.e., the ones who interact with you), your most valuable followers (a measure that includes follower count, follower-to-following ratio, verification, and more), and your best follower (a combination of most valuable and most engaged).
SocialRank 2.0 keeps those concepts, but adds a bunch of other ways to sort through the data, including the ability to filter all your followers by location, by interests, by activity level, or by where they work. (That last filter attempts to match Twitter data with LinkedIn data.) So for example, you could see if any of your followers work at a company where you’re looking for an intro, or if you’re traveling, you could see if you have any followers in the next city.
As you use filters to create lists of relevant users, SocialRank will also allow you to save those searches, export them to Twitter, and export as a CSV file. Oh, and for free users, you can now see the full list in each category, not just the top 10. Previously, that full list was limited to premium users — Taub told me SocialRank will eventually bring back premium accounts, but they’ll have more “bells and whistles.”
One reason the company is taking this approaching is the fact the moneymaking opportunity lies with brands who can use the data to selectively engage with their followers and find new ones (by looking up their competitors). In fact, just as it did with the launch of SocialRank 1.0, the startup has recruited a number of companies who are offering prizes to some of their most engaged users — Century 21, Bonobos, Juicy Coucture, Uber, Instacart, and Muhammad Ali (!).
You can read more about the new features on the SocialRank blog. The next step, Taub said, is adding more social networks, starting with Instagram.
