Social interactions like Facebook likes, comments, and shares, Twitter retweets and mentions, etc. are called social signals.
With the growth of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, search engines like Bing and Google now take into account various social signals when determining website ranking.
Note: Google encourages businesses to build their brand on social media as a long-term investment to drive qualified traffic, instead of aiming for short-term benefits like search ranking placement. Google’s own head of its web spam team Matt Cutts has stated that Google takes a cautious approach when it comes to social media, as social trends and relationships tend to change too quickly to fully map out. Without a reliable ‘map,’ Google is understandably reticent to assign more importance to social signals over other aspects of their search algorithm. In short, Google’s strategy is a sensible one - “wait and see” how things develop over time, as websites that provide real value develop longevity, trust and authority, and these are the websites that Google wants to ascribe higher search rankings to.
Social Signal Sources
Social media sites that search engines look to for measuring social signals include:
With more than 1.5 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most influential social network on the planet. Research shows that an average post on Facebook can reach up to 150,000 users, so even if no one is buying your products or services on Facebook, you should not be quick to dismiss Facebook as an important part of your business strategy, as Google processes data and information from Facebook to help determine your search rankings. In fact, Facebook seems to have the most influence on search engine rankings of all social media sites.
(Number of monthly active Facebook users. Source: Statista.com)
After Facebook, Twitter is the second biggest social media site in the world, with over half a billion tweets sent out every single day. Twitter has a significant amount of influence on the cybersphere and places great importance on tweeting posts that provide great value to followers over the amount of tweets sent …
(Over 500 million tweets are sent every single day. Source: Internet Live Stats)
Google+
As Google’s own social media site, Google+ naturally carries a significant degree of authority online, even if it has not reached the same level of growth and take up as Facebook and Twitter.
(More people are starting to interact socially on GooglePlus each week. Source: InternetLiveStats.com)
In addition to the big 3 listed above, there are a number of other social sites that should not be ignored, like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon.
(A number of social media sites provide important signals that can affect your search engine rankings)
Which Social Signals Should You Be Paying Attention To?
Search engines track various social signals, including the following:
- Facebook – e.g. how many Facebook likes, shares, and comments you have, growth rate of likes and shares, etc.
- Twitter – e.g. how many tweets and retweets a site has, the authority of the person sharing the URL, trending topics, etc.
- Google+ – e.g. who is following you (influential users), how many followers on GooglePlus your site page has accrued, authority of adds and shares, etc.
- Other sites – e.g. growth rate of Pins and re-Pins on Pinterest, upvotes on Digg, etc.
- Other signals – In addition to the above, there are other not so obvious signals that can indirectly influence search engine rankings. These include desirable and negative factors, such as links from authority sites (backlinks) (not as influential as they once were, but still a factor) [positive], and whether your site is deemed to be of low quality by other users [negative].
As a website owner, it’s important to not only find ways to develop your presence on major social networking websites, but also to be able to monitor and analyze your social media in order to improve your business results.
(Use social media marketing to improve your business results)
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, services, or company on social media, spot opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, avert impending crises, and spy on your competition. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include digital reputation managers, marketing professionals, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various providers have made available a range of tools to facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what consumers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their brands allowing them to react to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
Go here if you want to learn more social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about:
(Can you monitor your social signals effectively?)
In this article, we discuss a simple, yet effective WordPress plugin for tracking social media signals and increasing your social media influence online.
Presenting …
SocialMetricsPro – Social Media Analytics WordPress Plugin
Plugin Description
SocialMetricsPro is an easy-to-use social analytics WordPress plugin that is designed to help you improve your social media exposure in an uncomplicated way. It is built on a simple concept – the tool tracks how each signal is performing and displays either a green or red indicator. Your objective is to change all reds into greens.
(Social Metrics Pro provides a system that any website owner can operate … simply turn reds into greens!)
Colors indicate relative popularity. This simplifies your social analytics with Excel-like conditional color formatting. Posts with highest number of shares show up green. Posts with low social media activity are colored amber and red.
The plugin developers tested SocialMetricsPro on a network of 2,000+ sites over a period of 3 months. During this period, all they focused on was turning the “reds” to “greens” and then keeping everything “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 SocialMetricsPro developers, focusing on improving your social marketing can dramatically affect your search engine rankings, traffic and revenue!)
For more details go here:
Benefits Of Using Social Metrics Pro
Here are just some of the many benefits of using Social Metrics Pro to track Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and more right from your WordPress Dashboard on your website:
Really Easy To Install
Social Metrics Pro installs like every plugin. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your admin user account and activate.
Simple To Use
As mentioned earlier, the site owner’s objective is to turn more reds into greens. The plugin tracks and measures social signals so you know which social campaigns require investing more effort and where to optimize.
Select Only Signals From The Networks You Care About
SocialMetricsPro lets you centrally track and monitor social activity from networks like Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, StumbleUpon, Digg, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
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 of my posts are the most popular on social media?
- And more …
With SocialMetricsPro, all of this information can be accessed with a single click.
(SocialMetricsPro constantly tracks social signals from the social sites that you care most about!)
Features
SocialMetricsPro provides web site owners with many features. Here are just some of these features:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Widgets & Extensions Ready. You can extend its functionality using built-in and external widgets. SocialMetricsPro displays the latest stats right on your WordPress admin bar, display popular content on your sidebar or anywhere on your site using point-and-click widgets.
- One-click upgrades. You can update Social Metrics Pro with one click via the WordPress Updates page, or update the manually manually. You can also opt to receive email notifications whenever new plugin updates are released.
- Minimal usage of server resources. Reporting is very quickly, using minimal server resources. Report generation also includes the amount of time spent retrieving information and the server memory consumed when gathering and compiling the data.
Additional features include:
- Sorting, Searching And Filtering Features: Social Metrics Pro lets you sort and filter information however you like. You can perform keyword searches to study posts related to certain topics, and even filter the results by post authors, post type, category, or by publishing date.
- Export Data To Excel: You can export filtered, sorted data and custom queries to 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.
(Social Metrics Pro is really simple to use … just change all the red squares into greens!)
Testimonials
Below are some of the testimonials users have submitted for SocialMetricsPro:
”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
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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
SocialMetricsPro – Tips
A practical, step-by-step guide showing you how to optimize your social media strategy (i.e. turn reds into greens) is also included.
Support
SocialMetricsPro is well-supported, and comes with free lifetime updates and support, backed by a risk-free, 60-day, complete refund guarantee.
Plugin Pricing
SocialMetricsPro plugin is available in two editions:
- Single Site License – This edition enables you to install SocialMetricsPro on a single site. Includes free lifetime updates and support. Cost = $27.00 (one-time).
- Multi-Site Licensing – This license enables you to run Social Metrics Pro on all the sites that you own. Includes free lifetime updates and support. Price = $47.00 (one-time).
Please Note: The cost to purchase this product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The pricing above was current when this content was published. This may or may not be the actual pricing set by the product author when you visit the product site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing information here:
Additional Information
SocialMetricsPro requires a self-hosted installation of WordPress and can be instantly downloaded after purchase.
We Recommend
As mentioned earlier, with the rising importance of social sites like Twitter and Facebook, search engines are now taking into account social signals when determining a site’s ranking.
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 WordPress users instant feedback on the success of their social marketing strategy and guides 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 admin area.
We recommend getting this plugin if you own or manage WordPress sites and would like to save money on outsourcing your social media marketing or train your staff to manage your campaigns inhouse.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: SocialMetricsPro – Social Media Analytics For WordPress
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