Social recommendations like Facebook shares, likes, and comments, Twitter mentions and retweets, etc. are called social signals.
With the rise of social sites like Twitter and Facebook, search engines like Google and Bing now take into account various social signals to help determine website ranking.
Note: Google encourages website owners to build their social media 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 own web spam team has stated that Google takes a cautious approach when it comes to social signals, as social trends and relationships can change at a moment’s notice. Without a perfect ‘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 websites that Google naturally wants to rank higher in its search engine results.
Social Signals – Which Social Sites Matter?
Social media sites that search engines look to when measuring social signals include:
With almost 2 billion active users, Facebook is the largest social media network in the world. It has been estimated that an average post can reach over 100,000 users, so even if it seems like Facebook is not driving droves of customers to your site, you should not be quick to dismiss the power of leveraging Facebook, as Google uses social data and information from Facebook when determining your search rankings. In fact, Facebook seems influence search engine rankings more than other social media sites.
(Number of monthly active Facebook users. Source: Statista.com)
After Facebook, Twitter is the next biggest social media site in the world, with over 500 million tweets sent out every day. Twitter plays a significant role as a global influencer online and places great importance on tweeting posts that provide value to readers over the number of tweets sent …
(Over 500 million tweets are sent each day. Source: Internet Live Stats)
Google+
As Google’s own social networking 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 actively using Google+ every week. Source: Internet Live Stats)
In addition to the big 3 social sites listed above, there are a number of other social sites that should not be ignored, such as Pinterest, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
(Social media sites provide important signals to search engines that can affect your rankings)
Which Social Signals Should You Pay Attention To?
Search engines track a number of social signals, including the following:
- Facebook – e.g. how many Facebook comments, likes, and shares a person has, growth rate of likes and shares, etc.
- Twitter – e.g. how many tweets and retweets your site has, how influential the person sending a tweet is, trending topics, etc.
- GooglePlus – e.g. who is following you (high profile users), how many followers on GooglePlus a site page has accrued, spread rate of adds and shares, etc.
- Other sites – e.g. growth rate of Pins and re-Pins on Pinterest, upvotes on Reddit, etc.
- Not so obvious signals – In addition to the above, there are other not so obvious factors that can indirectly influence search engine rankings and traffic. These include positive and negative 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 visitors [negative].
As a business 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, measure and analyze social signals in order to improve your business results.
(Use social media marketing to help improve your results online)
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, measure the impact of campaigns, identify potential opportunities for engagement, and spy on your competition. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, brands, businesses, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, marketing teams, digital reputation management companies, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed many affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track what consumers are saying about your brand allowing you to respond to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
We have created a comprehensive article where we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. To learn more, go here:
(Are you searching for an effective way to monitor social signals?)
In this article, we discuss a simple, yet highly effective plugin for WordPress users for monitoring social media signals and increasing your social media influence online.
Let’s Review …
Social Metrics Pro – Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Description Of Plugin
SocialMetricsPro is an easy-to-use social analytics plugin that is designed to make improving your social media presence uncomplicated. It is built on a simple concept – the tool tracks how each signal is performing and returns either a red or green indicator. The user’s objective is simple … convert red squares into greens.
(A system that any website owner can follow … 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 show up amber and red.
The developers of Social Metrics Pro tested their plugin on a network of over two thousand sites 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”. According to the plugin developers, they were able to notice a 360% improvement in traffic for their top 10 performing sites, 410% more keywords ranked in the first page of Google and they also experienced a 310% increase in revenues.
(According to the plugin developers, improving your social media marketing can affect your search rankings, web traffic and revenue!)
More info:
Benefits
Below we have listed just some of the many benefits of using SocialMetricsPro to track Likes, Tweets, +1s, Pins and more from your WordPress Dashboard on your web site:
Quick And Easy To Install And Set Up. Ready To Use In Minutes.
Social Metrics Pro is very easy to install. Simply upload a zip file containing the plugin to your Plugin folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate.
Really Simple To Use
As mentioned earlier, the site owner’s goal is to turn red squares into greens. SocialMetricsPro tracks and measures social media signals the way Google sees it so you know where to put more effort and which ones need to be better optimized.
Track The Social Signals From The Networks You Care About
Social Metrics Pro lets you centrally track and monitor social activity from social media networks like GooglePlus, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon 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 Social Metrics Pro, all this information can be accessed with a single click.
(Social Metrics Pro constantly monitors social signals from the sites that you care most about!)
Features
Social Metrics Pro provides many unique features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Widgets And Extensions Ready. You can extend its functionality using external and built-in widgets. Access updated stats from your WP admin bar, display socially popular content on your blog sidebar or anywhere in your site using point-and-click widgets.
- 1-click updates. You can update Social Metrics Pro in one click via the WordPress Updates page, or update the manually manually. You can also choose to receive an email notification whenever new versions are released.
- Uses minimal hosting resources. Reports are compiled very quickly, using little hosting resources. The tool also displays the amount of time used to retrieve information and the server resources consumed when gathering and compiling data.
Additional plugin features include:
- Sort, Search And Filter Features: SocialMetricsPro lets you 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 post type, post authors, publishing date, or by category.
- Export Data To Excel: You can export and plot filtered data and custom queries 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.
(Social Metrics Pro is really simple to use … just turn reds into greens!)
Testimonials
Here are a few of the testimonials and feedback customers have published about the SocialMetricsPro plugin:
”Our entire marketing strategy relies on social media. Each post on the site has viral potential, but we needed one place to see which social networks are performing the best for us…We went ahead and got the PRO Version of Social Metrics.” Syed Balkhi, Founder of List25 and WPBeginner.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
Social Metrics Pro – Useful Tips
Social Metrics Pro comes with a practical guide showing you how to optimize your social media strategy (i.e. turn reds into greens).
SocialMetricsPro Plugin Support
Social Metrics Pro is well-supported, and comes with free support and free lifetime updates, backed by a no-risk, sixty-day, complete money-back guarantee.
Software Pricing
SocialMetricsPro plugin is available in two editions:
- Single Site License – This allows you to use Social Metrics Pro on a single domain. Includes free lifetime upgrades and support. Cost = $27.00 (one-time).
- Multi-Site License – This lets you activate SocialMetricsPro on all sites that you own. Cost includes free lifetime upgrades and free support. Cost = $47.00 (one-time).
Note: Pricing for Social Metrics Pro depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The above reflects the price when this content was published. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the product author when you visit the plugin site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details:
Additional Plugin Info
Social Metrics Pro requires a self-hosted installation of WordPress and can be instantly downloaded after purchase.
Our Recommendation
As mentioned earlier, with the increase in importance of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, search engines now take into account various social signals to help determine 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 you immediate feedback on the success of your social media marketing campaigns and guides you where to direct your efforts in order to improve your results.
SocialMetricsPro is ideal for beginners and advanced WordPress users alike. It tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and more directly from your WP dashboard.
We recommend Social Metrics Pro if you own or manage WordPress sites and want to save time and resources by focusing on under-optimized networks.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: SocialMetricsPro – Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress
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