Well here’s a blast from the past. Remember when people search was big? Back before Facebook swallowed up all our personal data there were like, a dozen different search engines out there devoted entirely to helping you stalk your friends and ex-girlfriends online. But times have changed and pretty much anyone you’d ever want to find online is one Google or Facebook search away.
So what’s a people search engine to do? Well, if you’re PeekYou, you use the data you’ve collected over the years to get into the suddenly lucrative social analytics market.
To that end, PeekYou has launched PeekAnalytics, a platform for providing marketers, brands, and agencies data about their customers on Twitter. It identifies where users exist elsewhere on the web and provides audience data gathered from more than 60 different social sites. On Twitter, it also looks at people’s followers and friends, analyzes keywords and hashtags and tracks URLs that users share.
PeekYou has been working on the platform for the past year and launched it in private beta last November. Since then more than 2,500 brands, agencies, and consultants have signed up for access, and PeekYou has used data from those trial customers to help refine the platform and get it ready for the public. Launch partners like Radian6, Big Fuel, Mashable, Nexalogy, and Media Profile.
For now, PeekAnalytics is focused solely on Twitter, but it plans to expand to other social platforms — like Facebook and LinkedIn — later this year. It’s being launched with a freemium model, with pricing based on the number of subscribers a certain brand has. Less than 20,000 is free, with pricing for more than that starting at $200 a month.