A couple of months ago, the Internet was blowing up about the hit show American Idol. This hype increased as global popularity engine Likester made predictions for the show through its Likester Idol technology. Likester was able to forecast who would be going home each week based on the number of Facebook Likes the contestants received both before and after their weekly performances.
The service proved to be accurate and turned into almost a spoiler service for the show. Because it became quite popular, Likester founder and president Kevin McCarthy began thinking about what else he could do with the technology. In the end, he came up with a social media platform called Likester Lists that allows users to track Facebook Likes based on a particular topic on a daily basis for free.
“Likester Lists is a platform that allows you to track the daily Likes that anything in the Facebook universe is receiving,” he said.
In a nutshell, the platform is an ongoing poll that calculates new data daily. There are other services that provide a similar service, but many of these charge for their data. Anyone can create a List, and once you do, Likester creates a dashboard that organizes all your Lists with images, links, and more.
For example, one List that already exists is “Who’s Winning the Shoe Wars?” Although some people might speculate that Nike receives the most Likes, it does not. It does bring in a few thousand Likes each day, but Converse brings in 20,000 Likes on average daily.
“What’s popular on a Net basis in the Facebook universe is not necessarily what’s popular on an ongoing basis,” said McCarthy.
Because Facebook’s Like data has grown to be tremendously valuable, McCarthy believes that Likester Lists will be beneficial to both general “for fun” users as well as professional users. He also sees the platform being extremely useful in the upcoming election season.
“In 6 months, I would bet that the political world is going to realize what Likester is onto here,” he said.
Likester has plans to create animated heatmaps that show the likes for each candidate in blue and red. This service is likely to really influence the election season because, as McCarthy pointed out, polls have a lot of flaws in them, but a Like analysis is purely data driven.
Could you see Likester shaking up the political scene during the upcoming elections? Let us know.