Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 2]: Content Performance

How is your original content performing out there on the social web? How is the user interacting with it? or, what is the life of your posts?

This is part 2 of the series “Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence“, a few days ago I published Part 1: The Hub in which we talked about different measurements for your blog or site.

Today we’ll look into content performance and as I said previously, probably my favorite one when it comes to metrics.

Objective

So let’s start with the “Why” it is important to track how your content performs:

• To see what kind of posts are consumed by your audience.
• How readers are engaging with it.
• The social platforms your visitors are using to share that content.

In this case I wanted to do an exercise I totally stole from Kristi Hines over at Kikolani and her post “Google PageRank Update – Internal Pages and Top Content Analysis“. You will need to gather information from different sources to put a table like this together but then we’ll look at some available tools that do something similar for you.

Here is the criteria included in the table: PR = PageRank (you can install an extension on your browser that will give you the PR on any url), PV = PageViews, Pr = PostRank Engagement Points (we’ll talk about PostRank in a second), CM = Comments, RT = Retweets, FB = Facebook shares, DE = Delicious bookmarks and CT = Click-throughs (I’m using Bit.ly data for this).

[table id=1 /]

Notice that there are a couple of posts missing the PageRank, it is probably because they’re too recent.

This can help you visualize things like how a topic performs on different social media channels, it’s pretty obvious in this table that no matter how popular a post about Twitter tools can get overall, it will not perform as good on Facebook. See what kind of posts motivate more comments or more tweets.

Also, notice how “One size fits all” just doesn’t apply…

PostRank

When it comes to content I will say that PostRank is a tool you should consider having, mostly because it does some of the work for you and it puts it all together on a beautiful dashboard.

PostRank doesn’t just gather data from different places, it also has its own rating system for posts using “Engagement Points”. Here is what you can see in the following image:

• This is the analysis of one post.
• The integration of Google Analytics to provide pageviews, visits, bounce rate and average time.
• The engagement events separated by type including Comments, Tweets, Diggs, etc.
• The chart displaying the Engagement Points and Pageviews over time giving you a great visual of the life of that piece of content.

I wanted to use this particular image to show you something. The post “10 Twitter Tools To Help You Track And Perform Better” was published on December 9 last year, notice how it finally dies completely at the beginning of February this year but wait… it comes back to life at the end of March, almost 2 months later.

It was a simple tweet. Turns out the dead horse was just sleeping… the point is that you have visibility to analyze it.

This next image is what they call “Engagement Trends”, it shows you the big picture over the last 3 months, the regional stats and the “Engagement Sources”.

Reactions

Another way to get a good idea on the performance is to track reactions. UberVu tracks them from Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and commenting systems like Disqus or IntenseDebate on specific url’s.

Also, you have the option to export this data on a CVS format to play with it on a spreadsheet.

Google Analytics / Content Performance

Of course Google Analytics will provide you with the traffic stats for each URL on your site. There is no need to visit two places if you have PostRank and you’re trying to measure posts on your blog. Visit the section “Content” on your dashboard.

You can sort data however you want.

Your Own Analytics On A Spreadsheet

This is something very easy to create on a spreadsheet, what’s going to take a little longer is getting all the data together. As I said in the previous post, the advantage of doing this is getting full visibility of your data in one place, on the other hand, your spreadsheet doesn’t get the information or updates it automatically.

Here is an example:

Also Read:

• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 1]: The Hub
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 2]: Content Performance (You Are Here)
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 3]: Your Network (Coming Soon)
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 4]: Impact (Coming Soon)
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 5]: Dashboard On A Spreadsheet (Coming Soon)

Now It’s Your Turn…

Are you a content marketer? Are you expecting your content to attract prospects to your blog? How are you tracking its performance? What tools do you use? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Happy Analyzing!

About Francisco Rosales
I'm the author of SocialMouths. I also help entrepreneurs and small businesses turn their vanilla "web presence" into a profit powerhouse using techniques on social media, content and email marketing to generate traffic and convert to leads and sales. Caffeine addict and a hopeless fan of Dr. Sheldon Cooper. Bazinga! Learn more

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