The story of Socialdatabase

Few people would place data management on par with the Paris to Dakar rally when it comes to thrills and adventure. But, to retired data-scientist turned rally driver, Roland Rijpma the mountains of data created by the explosive growth of the social media were becoming just as exciting as the arid dunes of north Africa.

It was a research thesis by university student Thomas Slabbers that tipped the balance in the favor of data, and set the stage for Roland’s “un-retirement”.

The paper: You are who you follow — A deeper analysis of how people act on Twitter crystalized Roland’s thoughts on the unprecedented opportunity presented by the rapidly growing amounts of publicly available data generated by the social media.

In July 2013, Roland, Thomas, and data engineer Peter Versteegen joined forces to found Socialdatabase. Beginning with publicly accessible Twitter data, it was not long before their data-complexity approach to analytics proved to be uniquely successful at generating fact-backed insights, and defining behaviorally predictive audiences.

Soon Socialdatabase’s servers were running 24/7, devouring, re-categorizing, and analyzing massive amounts of data. By 2015 this unprecedented appetite for data had not go unnoticed by Twitter who asked for an explanation.

At a meeting in Twitter’s San Francisco HQ Thomas explained how socialdatabase had downloaded, completely restructured, and analyzed the Twitter database. Twitter was surprised by the size, and effectiveness of this data restructuring. They immediately recognized that Socialdatabase had such a clear understanding of the Twitter database. Twitter were more than impressed. Rather than objecting to this as an overstep, the result of the meeting was an invitation to become Twitters first official API partner. This opened doors to even more of Twitters database, and with that, even deeper understanding.

Since 2013 Socialdatabase has grown from a single server to a database of over 23 trillion structured data points. Today we are a Twitter Marketing Partner with offices in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Dubai, and Tokyo. We deliver tailored audiences and insights to clients including Twitter, Google, Nike, Heineken, Philips, Nutricia, Samsung, and Slack.

Thomas Slabbers continues to run daily operations from Amsterdam, while Roland Rijpma focuses on improving, and enlarging our database, and keeping his entrepreneurial eyes open for the next exciting opportunity.

The story of Socialdatabase

Since 2013 Socialdatabase has grown from a single server, to a database of over 23 trillion structured data points. Today we are a Twitter Official Partner, and a preferred partner of Facebook. With offices in Amsterdam, Atlanta and Dubai, we deliver tailored audiences and insights to clients including Twitter, Google, Nike, Heineken, Philips, Nutricia, Samsung, and Slack.

Our purpose

We make ads relevant on Twitter by delivering advertisers the exact right audience they are looking for and deep, meaningful insights to help them understand who they are talking to.

The ability to make deep connections is the most beautiful thing a human being possesses. Everyday we at Socialdatabase try to better understand this human connectivity. And, there is no greater place to do such a thing than Twitter. As we all know what happens in the world starts on Twitter. But, Twitter is so much more — it’s emotion, it’s fun, it’s meeting new people and learning from their perspectives. It’s the voice of the people, and exactly this makes it a treasure trove of human insights and understanding. Especially if you know how to look for it, and this is exactly what Socialdatabase delivers.

Our principle

Our approach to targeting is different. We understand “You are who you follow.” On Twitter, users follow the people they WANT to hear from, and are more engaged with those conversations.

Our deep understanding of these connections tells us far more than generic demographics — a lot more.

By completely restructuring the world’s largest public database, Socialdatabase goes beyond relevance to deliver truly receptive audiences. That means our audiences are more precise, more scalable and more responsive.

Unlike traditional social media analytics firms, we don’t rely solely on keywords, conversations and self-reported profile data. We go deeper, using the data within the data. It’s these connections, interactions, and behaviors, that give us a much deeper understanding, defining audiences with unsurpassed precision, and effectiveness. We call it our SuperAudience-technology.