• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 17, 2014

Integration of social data to support search campaigns isn't new, but one company with its roots in search believes it has found a way to automate the ability to build social audience segments and apply them to other media.

Engineers at StatSocial, a provider of Twitter audience demographics data, are working on building custom audience segments that marketers can use in the social data platform or mine information to use in other media. If marketers at Huggies, for instance, want to spend money advertising on Twitter by getting beyond their 50,000 Twitter followers, StatSocial can find other Twitter users that do not follow the brand, but fit the profile of someone the brand should target.

Today, building audiences in the platform is a managed service, but StatSocial will automate processes, per CEO Michael Hussey. "Marketers will find the audience they want to buy and all the work will be done on the backend automatically," he said.

StatSocial will accomplish the task through Audience Explorer, offering in real-time more than 30,000 reports about major brands, such as Wal-Mart Stores. Brands will have the ability to buy a list of fans who are following tweets that are related to the retailer. The features will roll out in the first quarter of 2015, and will integrate with other platforms to offer real-time data in more traditional social media platforms.

Search marketers can use social data from sites like Twitter to identify potential new buyers. They can monitor keywords in Twitter to locate audiences that are tweeting about a specific topic and then use the data to optimize Web sites, paid-search ads and target in other media. This gives marketers the means to bid on specific keywords and hit new demographics using cookie data and audience data. For search engine optimization, the data enables marketers to build and optimize content -- the connective tissue running through a brand's complete strategy.

The features are part of StatSocial, a provider of Twitter audience demographics. The company, which recently rebranded from PeekAnalytics, offers brands a new depth of analytics like detailed interest and affinity graph that allow users to segment any Twitter audience across more than 30,000 variables. The platform also unlocks a wealth of data on Twitter audiences like age and sex, geolocation, income, education, ethnicity, and engagement to help customers and partners better target and curate their social audiences. In addition to reports, the new company is also able to generate custom infographics with the data.

Hussey is no stranger to data. He spun off StatSocial from the parent company, PEEKYou.com, which focused on people search. In 2001, he co-founded a series of online rating sites like RateMyProfessors.com and RateMyTeachers.com.