Finding the insight and ah-ha moments within social media conversations starts with knowing where to listen for your industry, brand, and use case. Today we’ll take a closer look at Socialgist’s data partner, VerticalScope, and the types of conversations taking place on their platform.
Find Your Passion
VerticalScope is a collection of 800+ enthusiast sites each with its own focus and set of passionate users. Sites range from the world’s biggest community on skyscrapers to bimmerfest.com for owners and lovers of BMW; marriage advice and relationship help forums to the ultimate guide to sea fishing in the UK.
The VerticalScope network represents discussions between more than 62 million registered users. These discussions attract over 125 million unique visitors each month who view over 600 million pages.
Image Source: VerticalScope, 2019
To better understand the breadth of coverage, the VerticalScope sites are categorized into the following verticals:
- Automotive: sedans, trucks, SUVs, crossovers
- Powersports: racing, motorcycles, ATVs
- Outdoor: seasonal, camping, fishing, hunting
- Home: DIY, hobbies and collectibles, pets
- Health: parenting, women’s health, health and diet
- Technology: A/V, home theater, mobile
Ready to Buy
The demographic breakdown of VerticalScope shows a user community with resources and intent to purchase: over 40% of users make over $100k year. 
Image Source: VerticalScope, 2019
VerticalScope users also show an engagement pattern that means a very high percentage of them are not available to be reached via traditional social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Image Source: VerticalScope, 2019
Analyze the Approach
The focused & organized nature of the VerticalScope sites means you can approach analysis from a community level. Let’s look at an example to illustrate.
If we are interested in understanding buyer behaviors around watch brands, a common approach would be to run brand keyword searches, often with qualifiers or boolean logic, looking for individual mentions.
With VerticalScope, we can level up and start by identifying the watch enthusiast communities like Watchuseek. The forum structure of the site means the data is already organized into helpful buckets like Watch Brands perfect for our use case.
By using these forums to inform our analysis we can quickly find relevant messages. Here is someone in the Rolex & Tudor forum asking about an issue influencing a purchase decision.
And the corresponding payload from the Socialgist VerticalScope index:
Follow the Thread
One key piece of metadata to note in the payload above is the ThreadID. This allows us to analyze the entire conversation around this date change issue as a whole rather than looking at just individual pieces of the puzzle out of context.
We can even close the loop with our original author commenting on how many people are bringing up issues. This feedback is likely to influence their purchase recommendation.
Watches and what else?
By having such well-defined communities VerticalScope can also offer intel into other product and brand affinities beyond the main focus of the site. For example, the Watchuseek forums include Luxury & Lifestyle with conversations about products like cars, bourbons, phones, jeans, and more.
Listen, Analyze, and Engage
Listening for your industry, brand, and use case is just the first step. The VerticalScope team offers audience engagement through advertising, custom content creation, email marketing, community sponsorships, and commerce program.
To learn more about how you can use VerticalScope data in your platform, fill out this form and we’ll get right back to you!
