Social interactions like Facebook likes, comments, and shares, +1s on Google+, etc. are called social signals.
Google has been tracking social signals as part of its ranking algorithm since late 2010.
Note: Google encourages businesses to build their social presence as a long-term investment to drive qualified traffic, instead of 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 assessing social media signals, as so many things change quickly on social media. Without a reliable ‘map,’ Google is understandably reticent to assign too much importance to social signals over other aspects of their search algorithm. In summary, Google’s strategy is a sensible one - “wait and see” how things develop over time, as websites that provide value tend to develop longevity, trust and authority, and these are the sites that Google wants to ascribe higher search rankings to.
Social Signals – Which Sites Matter?
Social media sites that search engines like Google and Bing look to when measuring social signals include:
With over 1.5 billion active users, Facebook is the largest social media network on the planet. It has been estimated that an average post on Facebook can reach up to 150,000 users, so even if it seems like Facebook is not driving a massive amount of sales on your website, you should not be quick to dismiss the importance of Facebook in your business strategy, as Google processes data and information from Facebook to help determine your search rankings. In fact, research shows that Facebook seems to have the most influence on search engine rankings of all social media sites, like Twitter orGooglePlus.
(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 has a significant amount of influence on the cybersphere and places great importance on tweeting posts that provide value to followers over the volume of tweets sent …
(Over half a billion tweets are sent each day. Source: InternetLiveStats.com)
Google+
As Google’s own social media site, GooglePlus naturally carries great authority online, even if it is still a fledgling social community compared to sites like Twitter and Facebook.
(More people are interacting socially on Google+ every year. Source: InternetLiveStats.com)
In addition to the big 3 social media giants listed above, there are a number of other sites that provide important social signals, such as Pinterest, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
(Social media sites provide important signals that could affect your search engine rankings)
Social Signals – Which Ones Should You Be Paying Attention To?
Search engines like Google and Bing track various social signals, including the following:
- Facebook – e.g. how many Facebook likes, comments, and shares a person has, growth rate of shares and likes, etc.
- Twitter – e.g. how many tweets and retweets your web page has, the number of people sharing your information, trending topics, etc.
- Google+ – e.g. who is following you (high profile users), how many followers on GooglePlus a site page has accrued, amount and growth rate of +1s, etc.
- Other sites – e.g. growth rate of Pins and re-Pins on Pinterest, comments on Digg, etc.
- Not so obvious signals – In addition to the above, there are other not so obvious factors that can influence search traffic. These include positive and undesirable factors, such as improving clickthrough rate (CTR) [positive], and whether your site is deemed to be of poor quality by visitors [negative].
As a business owner, it’s not only important to develop your presence on major social networking websites, but also to be able to track and analyze social signals in order to improve your business results.
(Using social media marketing can improve your results online)
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by online users, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spot new opportunities for engagement, and spy on the competition. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, products, topics, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social media channels like blogs, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, message boards, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including marketing teams, PR agencies, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and sales teams. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various technology providers have developed tools that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your products or brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
We have created a comprehensive article listing several social media tracking tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business,etc. For more information, go here:
(Can you monitor your social signals effectively?)
In this article, we explore a simple, yet highly effective plugin for WordPress-powered sites for monitoring social signals and increasing your social media presence online.
Introducing …
SocialMetricsPro – Social Media Analytics Plugin
Plugin Description
SocialMetricsPro is an easy-to-use social media analytics WordPress plugin that is designed to help users grow their social media influence in an uncomplicated way. It is built on a simple premise – the system measures how each signal is performing and returns either a green or red indicator. Your job is to convert all the reds into greens.
(Social Metrics Pro provides a system that anyone can follow … turn reds into greens!)
Colors indicate relative popularity. This simplifies your social analytics with Excel-like conditional color formatting. Posts with the highest number of shares show up green. Posts with low social media activity are colored amber or red.
The plugin developers tested Social Metrics Pro on a network of over two thousand websites over a period of 3 months. During this period, all they focused on was turning the “reds” to “greens” and then keeping their metrics on “green”. From these tests, 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, improving your social media marketing campaigns can can have a dramatic impact on your search rankings, traffic and revenue!)
Learn more here:
Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Social Metrics Pro to track Likes, Tweets, +1s, Pins and more from your WP Dashboard on your site:
Easy Installation
SocialMetricsPro installs just like every plugin. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your WordPress admin area and activate.
Very Simple To Use
As mentioned earlier, the user’s goal is to change all reds into greens. SocialMetricsPro tracks and measures social signals so you know which social marketing campaigns need you to invest more effort and which social marketing campaigns need to be better optimized.
Track The Signals You Care About
Social Metrics Pro lets you centrally monitor social media activity across leading social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Digg, and Pinterest directly from your WordPress dashboard.
SocialMetricsPro helps you get answers to questions like:
- Which social media networks work best for my site?
- Which posts are performing the best on these social networks?
- Which of my posts are the most popular?
- And more …
With SocialMetricsPro, all this information can be accessed with just one click.
(SocialMetricsPro actively monitors social signals from the social media sites that you care most about!)
Features
SocialMetricsPro offers WP users with many great features. Below we have listed just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- SocialMetricsPro Is Widgets And Extensions Ready. You can extend its functionality using built-in and external widgets. Access updated stats from your WP admin bar, add social content to your sidebar or anywhere on your site using widgets.
- 1-click upgrades. Update SocialMetricsPro with a single click via the WordPress Updates page, or update it manually. You can also choose to be notified via email when new versions are released.
- Minimal consumption of hosting resources. Social reports are generated very quickly, consuming little hosting resources. Report generation also includes the amount of time used to retrieve the information and the server memory consumed when gathering data.
Additional features include:
- Sorting, Searching And Filtering Features: Social Metrics Pro allows you to sort, search and filter data however you like. You can perform keyword searches to study posts related to certain topics, and even filter the results by publishing date, post authors, category, or by post type.
- 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 Excel or the spreadsheet application of your choice.
(SocialMetricsPro is really simple to use … just turn more reds into greens!)
Testimonials
Here are a couple of the testimonials that customers have submitted for the SocialMetricsPro plugin:
”Social Metrics is the easiest way to see at a glance which posts have performed well on social networks.” Kevin Muldoon, Founder of WPMods.com
***
”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
Useful Tips
SocialMetricsPro includes a practical, step-by-step guide containing useful advice on how to optimize your campaigns and improve your social media strategy (i.e. turn reds into greens).
Product Support
Social Metrics Pro is well-supported, and users get lifetime software updates and new releases for free with their purchase, backed by a no-risk, sixty-day, 100% money-back guarantee.
Software Price
SocialMetricsPro plugin is available in two editions:
- Single Site Licensing – This lets you activate Social Metrics Pro on a single site. Includes free lifetime updates and free support. Cost = $27.00 (one-time).
- Multi-Site Licensing – This license option lets you configure SocialMetricsPro on multiple web sites that you own. Cost includes free lifetime upgrades and free support. Cost = $47.00 (one-time).
Note: Pricing for the Social Metrics Pro product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. The pricing shown above was current at the time this review was published. This may or may not be the actual pricing set by the software seller when you visit the plugin website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details:
Additional Info
SocialMetricsPro requires a self-hosted installation of WordPress and can be instantly downloaded after purchase.
Our Recommendation
As mentioned earlier, Google has been elevating the importance given to social signals as part of its ranking algorithm.
No website owner can afford to ignore how important social media is to their online success. Social Metrics Pro solves the problem of how to find a simple, time-saving solution that gives users immediate feedback on the success of their social media marketing campaigns and shows them how and where to improve their results.
SocialMetricsPro is an ideal tool for beginners and advanced users alike. It tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and more directly from your WordPress dashboard.
We recommend getting this plugin if you own or manage WordPress sites and want to monitor which social networks are working for your business.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Social Metrics Pro – Social Media Analytics Plugin
***
***