What’s New at Blinkfire Analytics: Benchmarking & Enhanced Video Viewership Data

High fives all around — there’s a few more platform updates to talk about!

Groups – Entity Groups & Channel Groups

Entity Groups

We’ve given users more options to benchmark. Entity Groups lets you create custom lists of teams, leagues, players, and more.

For instance, if you were the Chicago Cubs, you could compare the team’s metrics versus other Chicago sports teams. The first step is to create a Chicago Teams group.

Once the teams are added, you can view how the Chicago Cubs compare to the White Sox, Bulls, Bears, and Blackhawks based on total followers, followers per platform, Follower Score, Influence Score, Activity Score, and Blinkfire Index.

Global Ranking Benchmarking + Custom Groups

A few years ago we launched Global Ranking, a way for teams in a league to see how they stack up based on public social media metrics like number of posts and engagements. We’ve now given our users more benchmarking options by building the Custom Entity Group feature. 

Using the Chicago Cubs again, we can compare the team to other Chicago teams based on number of posts, total engagement, engagements per platform, and more. This data can be viewed up to 365 days. The below table shows social media metrics for the Cubs, Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks, and White Sox from March 12 (the start of the COVID-19 sports lockdown) to May 4, 2020 based on total engagement.

If you want to add or remove metrics you can easily do that in Settings – set the specific table you want, instantly!

Why is this important?

The benchmarking possibilities are endless. Besides teams within a city or region, you can also compare teams (in league or out of league) based on social following. Additionally, you can utilize this comparison data for prospecting purposes – whether you’re gathering intel on future sponsorship opportunities or looking to dig into the data to tell a more complete story of your team.

Channel Groups

Channel Groups allow users to create, save, and report on a subset of channels for a specific entity. This is great for entities, large and small, who are looking to generate Fan Insights or Media Kit reports for a specific channel or channels.

Here’s a look at what happens in Fan Insights when the Chicago Cubs want to view their Instagram channels’ follower growth.

How does it work?

From these pages, users can choose a Channel Group and segment data. This is another step towards making Blinkfire’s platform even more customizable – whether it’s through a dashboard view (launched last week!) or for reporting purposes.

Enhanced Video Metrics – Audience Retention

Last year we built out our video metrics across Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube. Audience retention data included total time watched and average time watched, as well as live streaming and video on demand (VOD) viewership. As more of our customers used the audience retention data to understand how videos performed, they started asking How does this video compare to a platform’s average and total time watched? So, our team created a feature to answer their questions.

Now, for Facebook and YouTube videos, a team can view how their video performs against all their videos on the specific platform. You can see the video’s performance based on total time watched or average time watched — red = below average; yellow = average; and green = above average.

How can I use this data?

There are numerous ways to take advantage of this data. For example, if you produced a video series across Facebook and YouTube and viewership is below average, the social team could flag the series as underperforming and consider changing the content or posting strategy. If changes are made, the team can see how viewership changes over time. Remember, social is a 24/7 game, and Blinkfire’s platform is as near real-time as it gets. We’re giving you the tools to create content, collect data, report metrics, and iterate/test over and over again, so you’re publishing the best, most engaging posts for your fans and followers.