Social media man­agers with good mem­o­ries may remem­ber that two young start-up hun­gry New York­ers, Alex Taub and Michael Schon­feld, launched a project called “MVP” (Most Valu­able Fol­low­er) in 2012, which aimed to show Twit­ter users who their most valu­able fol­low­ers were. Sad­ly, its young co-founders both had demand­ing full-time jobs (both were work­ing for payment’s start-up Dwol­la) and even­tu­al­ly had to shut it down. But they’re back in action again with their new com­pa­ny, Mod­ern Mast, and they’re plan­ning to turn the idea behind MVP into a real busi­ness with the launch of Social­Rank, Mod­ern Mast’s first product.

More met­rics

Taub and Schon­feld have now left Dwol­la to focus their ener­gies ful­ly on Mod­ern Mast, and they’re billing Social­Rank as a major expan­sion on MVF. The intrigued social media man­ag­er will obvi­ous­ly want to know what Social­Rank offers that MVF didn’t. While the old MVF used the so-called “Gold­en Ratio” to cal­cu­late fol­low­er val­ue (the ratio of your total fol­low­ers to the total num­ber of peo­ple you fol­low), Social­Rank includes oth­er met­rics. As Taub puts it, for Social­Rank: “Val­ue is scarci­ty plus use­ful­ness plus importance.”

The appli­ca­tion tracks how often a fol­low­er engages with your account and con­tent, and iden­ti­fies the fol­low­ers that are most engaged. It jug­gles the Gold­en Ratio score with the engaged fol­low­er met­rics to pin­point your ‘best’ fol­low­er and it’ll sup­ply month­ly feed­back on how your top ten fol­low­ers have changed.

Avail­able free to indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies, Social­Rank also offers a $25-a-month pre­mi­um ver­sion that includes fol­low­er demo­graph­ics. This prob­a­bly has more appeal to busi­ness­es than indi­vid­u­als (it’s free for reg­is­tered non-profits).

Future plans

The next ques­tion form­ing in the mind of the can­ny social media man­ag­er is prob­a­bly, “where to next?” Taub is clear: the firm will build tools to assist brands not only to engage with their most valu­able fol­low­ers, but to recruit those whose demo­graph­ics sug­gest are a good fit but haven’t start­ed fol­low­ing yet. The ulti­mate aim, says Taub, is to turn your best fol­low­ers into “evan­ge­lists and ambas­sadors of what­ev­er your mes­sage is.”

Giv­en the fact that it launched only this month, Social­Rank is already attract­ing brands that are using its data in inno­v­a­tive ways. Harry’s Groom­ing, for exam­ple, is offer­ing a free hair­cut and shave to best fol­low­ers, while Spo­ti­fy is offer­ing a free month of Spo­ti­fy Premium.