Crowd Analyzer is a tool that enables companies to monitor people’s feelings about their brands expressed on social 
media through sentiment analysis. This enables companies to improve customer insights or understand why a particular campaign may have failed. Crowd Analyzer can even be used to uncover sentiment about a competitor’s brand to use in comparison.
Although there are similar tools on the market, they are only available in a few languages and for limited social media platforms. Crowd Analyzer is being built for the Arabic and Franco-Arabic market, as well as English (with a greater degree of accuracy than other tools). Crowd Analyzer also enables brands to see actual posts as opposed to analytics only.
In addition to being able to understand Arabic along with different dialects, Crowd Analyzer also includes a location based service, Mappr, which is unique to them and cannot be found in any of the social monitoring platforms. Mappr is a visual interactive Twitter map that displays interesting users and content on a map. You could find nearby Twitter users high follower count and identify influencers, you could search for nearby tweets that contain certain keywords, all tweet from a specific location, tweeted photos from a specific location, and so on.
The following is a Q&A session we had with the Crowd Analyzer founding team:
How did the idea of Crowd Analyzer come to life?
This idea was inspired by a discussion around big data between the founders, Ahmed Saad and Bahaa Galal. Bahaa has natural language processing experience and was discussing the ability to create an algorithm that understands Arabic. We took that idea to startup weekend Giza, and luckily, we won best demo. The idea then evolved to cater to social media as we saw how the potential in Arabic social media. Being interested in social media and empowering brands in the region, the rest of the founders, Rooda AlNeama and Mustafa Othman, came on board. Mustafa with his background in social media management, and Rooda’s background with her MBA and knowledge of the region. Understanding the huge influx of information coming from social media is what interested us most in enriching this information so that others find it useful.
Companies, brands, and marketing agencies are struggling to better understand customer characteristics and attitude. They spent a lot of money on market research activities to gain those customer insights. Although people’s opinions and thoughts are publicly and almost- freely available on the social web, it is a very hard task to manually understand and analyze them.
This created a need for automation tools that can collect, understand, and analyze people’s opinions on the social web.
Why create Crowd Analyzer? What is the gap you noticed in the market which lead to creation of Crowd Analyzer?
With Arabic being the fastest growing language on the Internet, (growing by 2500% in the last 10 years alone), there is a need for Arabic specified solutions. With the social media monitoring expenditure in the world being at $4.9 billion, this is a great industry to tap into, especially knowing that there are no solutions that truly understand Arabic even though many international brands are moving into the region.
How long did it take from ideation to creation? At which stage are you now with the product? When will it be officially launching?
We started in May 2013 with Ahmed and Bahaa. We have come a long way since then, winning numerous competitions such as winning the Startup Demo Competition during ArabNet Beirut 2014, winning the IE business school competition in Qatar in 2014, and being incubated at Turn8 for 4 months in 2o14. Moving from Egypt to the UAE has given us the opportunity to expand our network and tap into a new pool of clients who
are interested in the product. We are now in the BETA stage with our first paying clients, with the official platform launching soon.
Does Crowd Analyzer monitor all social networks?
Yes, Crowd Analyzer will monitor all social networks, with Twitter currently fully integrated and the rest following soon.
Who are the direct / indirect competitors to Crowd Analyzer?
There are multiple competitors out there such as Brandwatch and Radian6, however they don’t understand Arabic the way we do. We can differentiate among dialects, or understand Arabic context to categorize relevant material from irrelevant material.
What are the challenges currently being faced?
As with an entrepreneurial journey, there are always obstacles in our way but having a great team makes it easier to get through these obstacles. Being an entrepreneur means we don’t all have rigid job tasks but do a little of everything making sure that everyone has their input and tasks are done to the best of our ability. Putting different hats on means that your skills are improving all the time with different competencies, and learning new things that helps us grow.
Educating the market about social media and the importance of monitoring their presence for continued improvement is an ongoing process as well.
Monitoring Arabic language isn't easy at all, taking into consideration the different Arabic dialects in the Arab world. How did you manage to overcome this?
Exactly, Crowd Analyzer API can automatically understand the relevancy of the word, delivering to you what you are exactly looking for. You are no longer bombarded with thousands of posts that have the keyword you are looking for, we identify the posts with the meaning of the word you are looking for.
What subscription modules will be available? Free, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, etc 16- How will the pricing be?
After talking to many clients, we realized their needs are different depending on their size and industry. Crowd Analyzer will have a freemium level, and up to four levels of service to serve the needs of companies of all sizes. Hence why we came up with 2 different models.
- For SMEs and individuals: pay per mention, giving them the flexibility they need.
- For larger organizations: Subscription based model that is split into 3 categories depending on their sizes and needs.
What additional services, beyond monitoring will Crowd Analyzer provide? Consultancy? Whitepapers? Research? Analysis of data?
As of now, monitoring with relevant analysis built in to our platform.
The following is a YouTube video, made by Turn8, which explains what Crowd Analyzer is by its founders:
