Member Article

Are you Lissted? Newcastle firm launches social media tool that identifies key influencers

A Gosforth based media intelligence company which helps businesses to get their stories in front of the people who matter has launched a new online tool to navigate the wall of sound produced by social media.

Lissted is designed to help businesses in the North East and beyond find out who matters most in their sector, then monitor and engage with them via Twitter. The new development puts Lissted at the forefront of the burgeoning social media industry, beating national competitors to market with an application that allows users to research, create and manage individual lists of the most influential people in their industries.

Lissted is the brainchild of Adam Parker, a chartered accountant who previously spent nine years with PwC in Newcastle, and co-author of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations ‘Share This’ guides to using social media for PR.

He said: “Twitter is a fantastic forum to promote your business and get in touch with the people that matter in your industry. But the problem is isolating the relevant information from the great cacophony of tweets that are posted every hour.

“Lissted works as a superhuman social listening tool that cuts through the noise to find out what’s important. It starts with human-moderated lists of the people who really matter to an industry - whether journalists, politicians or brands themselves. From here, its algorithm maps their relationships to other accounts and predicts who they also listen to.”

The bespoke tool produces individual lists for different businesses, identifying those that are relevant to different sectors. Unlike rival products, Lissted uses a ‘small data’ approach that focuses on only listening to people and organisations that it has identified as being important to a particular niche.

“Influential in social media marketing terms means who matters most in your industry, not just those with the most followers or who tweet the most,” said Adam.

“If you can isolate those who have real world relevance in your business area, you can target them in your marketing efforts. A few positive words from them can be very valuable in terms of generating brand awareness, good will, enquiries and even sales.

“Lissted can also help if you find yourself in the middle of a crisis by immediately drawing down a list of who is talking about the issue and updating this in real time. Speed is always of the essence in this situation so knowing that you are focusing your efforts on the most relevant stakeholders as the news spreads is invaluable.”

Lissted, which is a no-tie in subscription app, is being particularly targeted at journalists looking for new story sources and alerts for breaking news, PR and marketing professionals researching ideas and seeking ‘hidden’ influencers, and politicians keen to find out what real people are thinking.

The app has been developed from within the labs of RealWire, of which Parker is chief executive, whose core business is issuing clients’ news releases to the most relevant online sites for their industries. The business publishes, tracks and monitors the releases and has partnership agreements with the Press Association and Dow Jones news wires.

Launched in 2001 RealWire now operates from offices in Lincoln and the Regents Centre in Gosforth. The company was named North East Digital Innovator of the Year in 2008.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Astute.Work .