Use Social Crawlytics to compare social sharing with competitors
Following on from our post last week showing tools for comparing competitors' use of online marketing, Dan Barker recommended I take a look at Social Crawlytics, a tool for benchmarking social media that I hadn't seen. I've completed a quick review, so this alert gives some background on the tool and you can decide whether it's relevant for you.
Our review of Social Crawlytics
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Social Crawlytics
This is a free, simple tool that is aimed at showing you how popular your content based on how much it is shared across the main social networks as Likes, Tweets and +1s. It’s produced by Brighton-based SEO Yousaf of Elevate Local (@yesekand) and I think is a great effort given it doesn't have the backing many services have.
Although it’s free, it’s based on credits and I found myself…
New report shows the level of amplification you should expect from Facebook
I’ve written before that “fans are vanity, engagement is sanity” in relation to Facebook brand pages. A new joint report, The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works produced by comScore and Facebook has been published that further stresses the effectiveness of engaged fans to a brand’s return on investment. It states
“While the vast majority of large brands today have an active social media presence, there continues to be an over-reliance on simple counting of Facebook Fans as a key performance metric.”
Whilst I am inherently sceptical of any report funded by a platform which stands to benefit financially from many of the activities it recommends, there are some genuinely useful data and insights in this report. It also digs a little deeper into Facebook’s Insights data – available to any Page owner and specifically references the metrics that…
Google Social Analytics - an in-depth review
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Blog summary
Our review of Google’s new Social Analytics features
Avinash Kaushik, now Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist announced this new Google Analytics feature at his keynote at SES New York in March 2012, showing this is a major update that Google want to promote.
August 2012 update
At the time it was part of a beta referred to as "Social Analytics", but it is is now available to all Google Analytics users and as is shown in grab of the menu on the right it's
The majority of the reviews of Social Analytics so far have simply included the screengrabs available from the Google Analytics blog summary, so I thought I would go into a bit more depth and give my view on what’s helpful and what’s not so…
A comparison of the three most popular influencer finding tools: Klout, Kred and Peerindex
As social networks continued to grow rapidly, so has interest in influence. Global companies are realising the importance of targeting high profile bloggers, journalists and celebrities, and have increasingly sought to reach out to these influencers for endorsement and to drive word-of-mouth about the brand.
While FMCG brands like Snickers can easily identify popular celebrity bloggers, businesses in other fields can have a harder task to find relevant influencers. To cater for this, a new wave of influencer scoring, based on social media analytics, has emerged, most notably Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.
Dan Purvis from the Meltwater Group, explains why these tools are growing in importance:
"Identifying who wields influence has lately become a hot topic of considerable proportions in marketing, PR and comms teams the world over. As…
Improving the accuracy of web analytics for social media tracking
There is a big elephant in the web analytics room... We are less likely to accurately track visits referred from social networks than we are visits from more traditional sources. ‘Less’ likely because the rise of those sources of traffic has coincided with (or helped cause) the rise in use of mobile apps or desktop clients at the expense of traditional web browsers.
So the visits you see as being reported as referred from one of the social networks are only the tip of the iceberg.
You’re almost certainly getting a better return on your social marketing that you think. It’s just not showing up where you’re looking for it. As we near the end of 2011 many are asking:
“If social is so ‘big’ why can’t I see those visits in my site’s analytics?”
If your calculations of the return on your efforts in…
Understanding who shares what and why?
In 2011, we've heard a lot about the power of social media for "amplification" of messages, i.e. social sharing. Amplification will happen naturally if you can create the right type of content that is valueable and shareable for your audience - whether that's infographics, video or a whitepaper. I think many companies use their blog, Facebook or Twitter to test which types of content and formats are most shareable and then refine their approach based on what's shared and what's not.
Here's a different approach based on understanding the psychology of sharing within your audience. It's about understanding the motivations for sharing amongst different groups and then developing the right content and seeding that works for this group. Next Fifteen has a useful whitepaper that expands on this, but I found this chart most useful as a summary of the motivations; prompting ideas on how…
Using Tweetreach to find out your main influencers in Twitter
I’m writing this post to share a neat, free tool which as it says in its strapline answers the question How far did your tweet travel? I’m prompted to write this summary since I was recently asking this question after Chris Soames, one of our Smart Insights writers, wrote a popular post on finding the best harshtags in Twitter which was widely shared.
To answer the question of who is influential in sharing your tweets, Tweetreach provides a great simple, tool to help with this. If you enter the URL for the page your tweet links to, it will show you Retweets, new tweets not referencing the original and most usefully which Twitter users contributed the most "impressions":
You can see that this post was successful because it was shared by several…
ToBeSocial tools enable you to benchmark your campaigns against competitors
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: ToBeTracker
We like this simple, free tool which enables you to visualise the growth history of fans of Facebook pages. This example shows how you can see the growth rates of campaigns once registered on the system. Data is extract direct from Facebook Insights using the Facebook API to extract data.
Note: this campaign no longer live, but is still seeing growth.
Marketing implications of this tracking tool
This is a simple tool that can help benchmark what is working for your competitors. You can browse different categories of companies or compare 3 or 4 pages - handy for presentations.…
I’m finding the news aggregator Summify interesting and useful
Value: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Summify News Aggregation Service
I’ve been using Summify for the last couple of weeks as a way of keeping up-to-date with the latest conversations on the social networks. I’m letting you know about it since I’ve found it quite handy since:
Just 5 stories - delivered by Email once a day - helps counter information overload :)
Relevant stories are shared by people I'm connected to who I trust
Often turns up an interesting story or piece of advice I’ve missed elsewhere
Looks good but more important learns through what you click on
Summify have a post here explaining how it works. They say:
The Summify algorithms use dozens of signals, but in general news that has been shared, liked and retweeted a lot by your friends is considered more important. However, not all of your friends are equal…
Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: The Next Web
Last week Twitter quietly changed it’s method of linking from tweets through to sites. It didn’t post it to its main blog but it was reported by The Next Web - see link above - thanks Dan Barker for alerting me to this. However, the Next Web didn’t go into the details of how this could affect your analytics, which is what we’re alerting you to here.
What this means in practice is that if you are active in Twitter you will see a sharp increase in referrals from T.co domains which is what we’ve seen:
Note that the traffic using other shortened URLs such as bit.ly or Ow.ly, which is a big…
