My Most Valuable Follower Is a Jonas Brother, and Other Things I Learned From SocialRank

My most important Twitter follower is a Jonas Brother. Kevin Jonas, to be exact, the esteemed oldest brother of the brood. I’m not sure when or why that happened. I never followed him, last I checked. His particular boy-band brotherhood was just a little past my time.

But there was Kevin’s name, fed to me by social analytics tool SocialRank, and of my list of key Twitter devotees, the boy-band celebrity beat out the likes of Om Malik, Dave Morin and even my bosses Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg for most valuable member of my tweet clan.

SocialRank is an audience assessment tool, used by brands and the toiling social media managers behind them. It lets you sort your followers into groups like “most valuable” (calculated based on verification checks, a person’s number of followers/followees and other data) or “most engaged” (how much they retweet, mention and reply to you). You can search through your followers’ bios to figure out who in your audience founded a company, or loves pizza, or follows boxing.

Starting today, SocialRank will let you perform similar surgery on your Instagram followers, dissecting who they are, what they care about and where they come from. With the launch of the Instagram analysis tool, Muhammad Ali, singer Christina Perri and rapper Ryan Leslie will be using it to reward certain followers with things like concert tickets and swag.

The company is playing in a competitive landscape, going up against other better-funded startups with their own social media audience analysis tools, like Sprinklr and Salesforce. SocialRank has raised a comparatively paltry $1.15 million in a round led by Vaizra Investments. Sprinklr, for example, has raised roughly 77 times that amount. For now, SocialRank is self-serve and a cheaper audience analysis tool, which is how it hopes to win away customers. It’s still unclear how it plans to make money but premium, paid features seem like a possibility.

When I discovered Kevin Jonas was my most important follower, I went on the hunt to figure out why. SocialRank surfaced his tweet stream so I skimmed his recent tweets and quickly discovered he was a Product Hunt and Meerkat fan. Given I’ve covered both and was the first reporter to ever write about Product Hunt, that might be the reason he follows me. He’d also recently created his own app called Yood, which appears to be a Foursquare/Yelp rival of some kind.

I’ll find out soon enough because Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt’s founder, made an introduction and voila! Kevin Jonas and I will be hopping on a call soon. I’ll report back on why he joined my Twitter brood, if he lies awake at night fearing Obama’s predator drones and whether the Jonas Brothers will be getting back together. Also maybe some stuff about tech.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

We have a request

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

1. Advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan.

2. We’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — we believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

It’s important that we have several ways we make money, and that’s why we ask readers for help keeping Vox free. Our goal today is for 47 Vox readers to pledge an annual financial gift to Vox to help us keep our work free for everyone. Will you become one of them?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$95/year

$120/year

$250/year

$350/year

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $120/year

Yes, I'll give $120/year

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via