Executive Summary
A prominent New York-based social media insights company partnered with Elastiq to build a platform capable of ingesting, processing, and analyzing billions of messages daily for audience segmentation and content performance forecasting.
Client Profile
A leading social media insights company dedicated to understanding audience sentiment and behavior. Their platform serves media companies, brands, and political campaigns with actionable intelligence derived from social conversations.
Business Challenge
Processing social media at scale presents unique technical challenges:
- Massive data ingestion requirements (5+ billion messages daily at peak)
- Real-time audience segmentation and content performance forecasting needs
- Identity resolution across multiple platforms without explicit identifiers like email or phone
- Multi-platform coverage including Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitch, and YouTube
Elastiq Solution
We architected a comprehensive social intelligence platform with multiple specialized components:
High-Throughput Data Ingestion Pipeline
Built on scalable Google Cloud infrastructure, the ingestion layer handles peak loads of 5+ billion messages per day across all major social platforms with sub-minute latency.
Data Processing Pipeline
Implemented using Google Cloud Dataflow for parallel processing at scale:
- Entity extraction to identify people, brands, and topics
- Entity resolution to link mentions across variations
- Topic modeling to categorize conversations
- Sentiment analysis to gauge audience reactions
Audience Segmentation
Leveraged Google Cloud Vertex AI machine learning models for:
- Age and gender prediction from behavioral signals
- Content and collaborative filtering for interest mapping
- Feature-based clustering for audience grouping
Identity Resolution
Cross-platform user identification without email or phone numbers using:
- Statistical algorithms: Soundex, Levenshtein Distance
- Machine learning: Cosine similarity using NLP embeddings
- Behavioral pattern matching across platforms
Custom Dashboards
Looker Studio visualizations providing key metrics and trends in real-time, enabling clients to act on insights as conversations unfold.
Results
The platform now provides:
- Accurate audience segmentation by interests, demographics, and behavior
- Content performance prediction across audience segments
- Effective cross-platform user tracking and behavior analysis
- Real-time trend detection and sentiment monitoring
Technical Highlights
Handling Scale
At 5 billion messages per day, traditional architectures fail. Our solution uses:
- Auto-scaling ingestion workers that respond to traffic patterns
- Partitioned processing to parallelize across message streams
- Efficient storage with hot/warm/cold tiering for cost optimization
Identity Without Identifiers
Resolving user identity across platforms without emails or phone numbers required innovative approaches combining statistical name matching, behavioral fingerprinting, and ML-based similarity scoring.
Conclusion
By combining high-throughput data engineering with advanced machine learning, Elastiq enabled real-time social intelligence at unprecedented scale. The platform transforms raw social media chaos into actionable audience insights-helping brands understand not just what people are saying, but who is saying it and why it matters.