Social recommendations like Twitter retweets and mentions, Facebook comments, shares, and likes, etc. are called social signals.
With the rising importance of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, search engines like Bing and Google are now taking into account a range of social signals to help determine website ranking.
Note: Google encourages businesses to build their brand on social media as a long-term investment to drive qualified traffic, rather than aiming for short-term benefits like search ranking placement. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team has stated that Google takes a cautious approach when it comes to social media, as social trends and relationships can change at a moment’s notice. Without a reliable ‘map,’ Google is understandably reticent to assign more importance to social signals over other aspects of their search algorithm. In summary, Google’s strategy is to “wait and see” how things develop over time, as websites that provide true value normally develop longevity, trust and authority, and these are the sites that Google naturally wants to ascribe higher search rankings to.
Social Signal Sources
Social sites that search engines look to when measuring social signals include:
With more than 1.5 billion active users, Facebook is the largest social community on the planet. It has been estimated that a single post on Facebook can reach over 100,000 users, so even if no one is buying your products or services on Facebook, don’t be quick to dismiss Facebook as an important part of your online business strategy, as Google uses data and information from Facebook to help determine your search rankings. In fact, Facebook seems influence search rankings more than other social media sites.
(Number of active Facebook users. Source: Statista.com)
After Facebook, Twitter is the second largest social media site in the world, with over 500 million tweets sent out each day. Twitter plays a significant role as a global influencer on the cybersphere and places great importance on the authority of tweets posted to readers over the number of tweets sent …
(Over 500 million tweets are sent every day. Source: Internet Live Stats)
Google+
Google’s own social media site naturally carries great authority online, even if it is still a fledgling online community compared to sites like Facebook and Twitter.
(More people are interacting on GooglePlus each month. Source: InternetLiveStats.com)
In addition to the big three listed above, there are a number of other sites worth paying attention to, like Pinterest, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit.
(A number of social media sites provide important signals that could affect your search engine rankings)
Social Signals – Which Ones Should You Pay Attention To?
Social signals tracked by search engines like Google and Bing include the following:
- Facebook – e.g. how many Facebook comments, likes, and shares you have, growth rate of shares and likes, etc.
- Twitter – e.g. tweets and retweets, how influential the person sharing your URL is, trending topics, etc.
- Google+ – e.g. who is following you (influential users), how many followers on GooglePlus a web page has accrued, amount of adds and shares, etc.
- Other sites – e.g. growth rate of Pins and re-Pins on Pinterest, upvotes on StumbleUpon, etc.
- Other signals – In addition to the above, there are other not so obvious social media-related factors that can influence search engine traffic and rankings. These include desirable and undesirable factors, such as backlinks from authority sites (not as important as they once were, but still a factor) [positive], and whether your site is deemed to be irrelevant by other users [negative].
As a business owner, it’s important to not only grow your social media presence, but also to be able to track and analyze social signals in order to improve your business results.
(Use social media marketing to improve your results online)
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and mind share, avert impending crises, identify opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, businesses, topics, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, social media monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including market researchers, online reputation management companies, marketing teams, social marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately a number of providers have developed many tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict what consumers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about your products or brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
We have written a comprehensive article listing over 30 social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc. See this page to learn more:
(Are you measuring your social signals effectively?)
In this article, you will learn about a simple, yet effective WordPress plugin for tracking social media signals and growing your social media influence.
Announcing …
Social Metrics Pro – Social Analytics Plugin
Description Of Plugin
Social Metrics Pro is an easy-to-install social media analytics premium WordPress plugin that is designed to help you increase your social media influence online in an uncomplicated way. It is built on a simple concept – SocialMetricsPro tracks and measures how each signal is performing and returns either a red or green indicator. The site owner’s objective is to convert all reds into greens.
(SocialMetricsPro provides a system that any user can operate … turn all the reds into greens!)
Colors indicate relative popularity. This simplifies your social analytics. Posts with highest number of shares display green. Posts with low social media activity display amber or red.
The developers of Social Metrics Pro tested their plugin on a network of 2,000+ sites over a period of three months. During this period, all they focused on was turning the “reds” to “greens” and then keeping everything “green”. According to the plugin developers, they noticed that their top 10 best performing sites saw an improvement of up to 360% more traffic, 410% more keywords ranked in the first page of Google and their revenue increased by 310%.
(According to the plugin developers, focusing on improving your social marketing can positively affect your search rankings, traffic and revenue!)
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Social Metrics Pro to track Likes, Tweets, +1s, Pins and more from your WordPress Dashboard on your web site:
Quick And Easy To Install And Use. Be Up And Running In Minutes.
Social Metrics Pro is very easy to install. Simply upload a zip folder that contains the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your administrator section and activate.
Really Simple To Use
As mentioned earlier, your objective is to turn all the reds into greens. Social Metrics Pro tracks and measures social media signals the way Google sees it so you know where to apply more effort and which need to be better optimized.
Track Only Signals From Social Networks You Care About
Social Metrics Pro provides a powerful dashboard to track and monitor social activity from networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Pinterest.
SocialMetricsPro lets you easily answer questions like:
- Which social media networks work best for my site?
- Which posts are performing the best on these social networks?
- Which are my most popular posts?
- And more …
With Social Metrics Pro, all of this information can be accessed with just one click.
(SocialMetricsPro constantly monitors social signals from the social sites that you care most about!)
Features
Social Metrics Pro provides many features to WordPress users. Here are a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Be up and running in very little time.
- Widgets And Extensions Ready. You can extend the plugin’s functionality with external and built-in widgets. Social Metrics Pro displays the latest information from your WordPress admin bar, display socially popular content on your blog sidebar or anywhere in your site using point-and-click widgets.
- 1-click upgrading. You can update SocialMetricsPro with one click via the WordPress Updates screen, or update the manually manually. You can also choose to be notified via email whenever new versions are released.
- Low-resource consumption. The plugin generates social metrics reports in seconds, consuming very little hosting resources. Report generation also includes the amount of time it took to retrieve the information and the server memory consumed when gathering and compiling data.
Additional plugin features include:
- Sorting, Searching And Filtering Features: Social Metrics Pro lets you sort and filter the data as you like. You can perform keyword searches to study posts related to certain topics, and even filter the results by publishing date, post type, post authors, or by category.
- Export Data To Excel: You can export and plot data in Excel for further analysis. Data can be exported in tab-delimited and comma-separated file formats, and imported to the spreadsheet application of your choice.
(SocialMetricsPro is simple to use … just convert all red squares into greens!)
Testimonials From Users
Below are a couple of the testimonials and feedback plugin users have provided for SocialMetricsPro:
“Social Metrics Pro is the essential plugin we use to monitor how our content performs on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It’s simple, neat and works precisely as you would expect it. When we work with our clients such as T-Mobile, the .Me domain name registry and others, Social Metrics Pro is the plugin we use to create reports as well as keep track on each bit of content to optimize it for future performance.” Ivan Brezak Brkan, Editor of Netokracija.com, TechCrunch EU Contributor
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”If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve.” Goes one of the most important sayings in business. And this is particularly true for tracking of your social mentions I found. There were two things that helped me a great deal to increase sharing after installing Social Metrics: First, I was able to see that some of my articles would perform much better on networks I wasn’t particularly using, such as StumbleUpon for example. Secondly, I could filter out the best performing content more easily and analyse what makes my readers share. Since then I have focused strongly on producing and replicating those posts that performed best.” Leo Widrich, Co-Founder of Buffer
Plugin Tips
Social Metrics Pro includes a practical guide on how to optimize your social media strategy (i.e. how to turn reds into greens).
Support
The plugin is well-supported, and users get lifetime updates and new releases for free with their purchase, backed by a no-risk, sixty-day, 100% refund guarantee.
Product Pricing
Social Metrics Pro plugin is available in two editions:
- Single Site Licensing – This lets you activate SocialMetricsPro on a single web site. Cost includes free lifetime updates and free support. Cost = $27.00 (one-time).
- Multi-Site Edition – This edition allows you to set up Social Metrics Pro on unlimited sites that you own. Cost includes free lifetime upgrades and free support. Price = $47.00 (one-time).
Note: Current pricing for the product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. The pricing shown above was correct at the time this content was published. This may or may not be the actual pricing set by the product developer when you visit the website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing information here:
Additional Info
SocialMetricsPro requires a self-hosted installation of WordPress and can be instantly downloaded after purchase.
Get The Plugin
As mentioned earlier, social signals impact search engine rankings and Google has been tracking social signals as part of its ranking algorithm.
No website owner can afford to ignore the importance of social media. SocialMetricsPro solves the problem of how to find a simple, time-saving solution that gives website owners instant feedback on the success of their social media marketing strategy and guides them where and how to improve their results.
Social Metrics Pro is an ideal tool for beginners and advanced users alike. It tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and more directly from your WP admin area.
Get this plugin if you own or manage WordPress sites and would like to learn how to use social signals to improve your search rankings.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Social Metrics Pro – Social Media Analytics Plugin
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