Everyone knows that social media provides some great opportunities
for marketing, but measurement issues continue to plague businesses.
You know content is being shared, but you don't know how people who
its being shared with are responding to it.
ShareThis, which reaches 400 million people a month through social
media share buttons across content all over the web, has released
some new metrics for measuring social media effectiveness.
One of the metrics is its Audience Index, which lets publishers
understand and compare their social audiences against 850,000 other
sites (and soon against categories), find out what types of
influencers your site attracts, and find out how well you connect
with influencers, listeners, and engaged customers.
The other metric might be even more useful. That would be "Social
Reach".
"surveyed publishers and found that
over 60% wanted (and were missing) social referral analytics,"
ShareThis explains on the company blog. "Social Reach measures
the true value of shared media across the web by looking at
outbound sharing and inbound social traffic and, in the process,
gives proper credit to the listener/responder of a share as much
as the original influencer/sharer. Publishers can now get a more
accurate measurement of how a piece of content circulates around
the Web after it’s been shared across any service, rather than
just the simple number of shares counted by a single service like
Facebook."
"Social Reach is built in to all of ShareThis' new share buttons
that we introduced a couple of weeks ago, and the Social Reach
score of each piece of content can be displayed on any page where
our buttons are installed," the company says.
ShareThis sharing & social reach data - your social equation
ShareThis shared some interesting stats regarding Social Reach
with TechCrunch. For example, according to the company, Facebook
accounts for 45 percent of all shared content across its network,
followed by email with 34 percent, and Twitter with 12 percent.
While Facebook may get more shares from ShareThis, email appears
to be more effective, as people are more likely to click on an
emailed link (31 percent out of the 34 percent, compared with 36
percent out of FB's 44 percent).
Either way, the metrics could prove to be very useful for
publishers looking at optimizing their social media marketing
strategies.
