Since PostRank joined the Google family, our combined teams have been hard at work on some exciting new projects. As our focus shifts to making these available to you, it’s time for us to retire others.
To make sure this is a smooth transition and to ensure that your site is not affected, we’re sharing the timelines below for the closing of the Top Posts widget and the Google Reader extension (for all browsers).
- The Top Posts widget and WordPress plugin installs will continue to work as usual until April 1st. At that time the Top Posts widgets and the PostRank APIs will be disabled. Please remove the Top Posts widget javascript code from your site before April 1st, and note that after this time the widget will not display any data.
- Similarly, the Google Reader extension will continue to operate until April 1st. If you are a current user, you can safely remove the browser extension any time before April 1st.
Finally, as of today you will no longer be able to install new Top Posts widgets or Google Reader extensions. This is for new installations only. As mentioned, existing installations will work until April 1st.
We hope you found these services valuable. If you have any questions about the retirement of these services please direct them to support@postrank.com.
From the seed of an idea in late 2006, to the launch of PostRank in mid 2007, and an incredible four years of continuous learning, iteration, and developing and launching new products—what an amazing experience it has been. And yet, the best is still yet to come. Today, we are excited to announce that PostRank has been acquired by Google!
We know that making sense of social engagement data is important for online businesses, which is why we have worked hard to monitor where and when content generates meaningful interactions across the web. Indeed, conversations online are an important signal for advertisers, publishers, developers and consumers—but today’s tools only skim the surface of what we think is possible.
We are extremely excited to join Google. We believe there is simply no better company on the web today that both understands the value of the engagement data we have been focusing on, and has the platform and reach to bring its benefits to the untold millions of daily, active Internet users. Stay tuned, we’ll be sure to share details on our progress in the coming months!
Of course, we wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for all the help, feedback, and support we’ve received from our community over the past four years—thank you all, you know who you are, and we truly couldn’t have done it without you!
Ilya & Carol
P.S. Our team will be moving to Google’s Mountain View offices in California. So, if you are nearby, come say hi; we are friendly Canucks! 
Please send all press inquiries to press@google.com.
Pam Sahota is one of many individuals who has included us in their toolkits on the popular OneForty – a social business software hub we’re a big fan of here at PostRank. Last month I had the chance to chat with Pam about a king called content and her experience with PostRank Analytics.
Pam is a Marketing Communications and Social Media Manager at Intronis Cloud Backup + Recovery in Boston, MA. Pam recently graduated from Suffolk with an MBA. She’s a freelance blogger, social media geek, and avid Red Sox Fan. While working for Holland-Mark, Pam was able to use PostRank Analytics to listen, analyze and keep in touch with what was happening with client’s online content.
“Online content is important because without content you have no value to offer the target market online. You can use social media, but without the content, social media cannot do as much for your brand.” said Pam as we discussed the importance of online content for the clients she worked with. “Content shows what a company does, the people behind the brand and give consumers what they want (or what they will want). As many say ‘content is king’.”
Like many PostRanker’s using our tools in an agency environment, Pam found that PostRank Analytics does a great job of demonstrating to clients what content is relevant, valuable and shared among audiences on the social web. When using PostRank with clients, Pam found that “it assisted in seeing whether the client’s content was relevant, as well as the content of the competition, bloggers in the sphere and others. It was great for curating content, as well as keeping track of what was being said online and analytics.” Specifically she said that “PostRank is great for assisting clients in starting out with their content hub, especially those who had not used social media in the past and needed to start fresh.”
I want to personally give a big shout out to Pam and thank her for taking some time out of her busy schedule to talk to me about her experience. The thoughts and insights she shared have help us here at PostRank learn more about how our tools are being put to use.
Tomorrow morning while you’re perusing your emailed Daily Engagement Report over coffee, your eyeballs are in for a treat. We overhauled the Reports to provide you with the clearest, most relevant information about your websites’ content’s performance with your audience on the social web.
The Reports offer an at-a-glance overview of how your site’s content performed the previous day, and whether that’s better or worse than expected based on past performance.
There is also an engagement activity breakdown by social hub, giving you a view of your content’ “culture” and where your audience likes sharing best.
And there is the Activity Stream, giving you a snapshot of the specific fans, actions, and hubs on which your content is getting the most traction.
For the traditionalists, at the top of each report is a link to the old style if you’d like to do a comparison. And we’d love to hear your feedback. There is a link in the light blue-grey section near the bottom of the report as well where you can let us know what you think of the updated Reports, and your preferences so we can make them even better.
Thank you to everyone who participated in our webinar this week. In particular, I would like to thank our guests:
It was an absolute pleasure to have these individuals talk about their experience with blogging and PostRank Analytics. In my opinion, their thoughts and insights made this our best one yet! If you missed it live, you can watch a recording of the webinar here:
PostRank in the Real World: Community Stories from PostRank Inc. on Vimeo.
Questions from the webinar
Q: What other social media measurement tools for the panelists use in addition to PostRank and how do they integrate them?
A:
- From Aaron – Klout – I find that the tool is useful for understanding your authority on Twitter.
- From Angie - Klout – I find that PostRank works better for my needs time-wise.
- From Gini -Google Analytics – I use Google Analytics and PostRank together.
Q: What are a couple of the main criteria you use when deciding if blogging is a good strategy for their business?
A:
- From Gini – If the client is looking for things like thought leadership for an individual, credibility for an organization but they have a strong spokesperson or personality that can manage the process or if they are looking for things like speaking engagements or bi-line articles, things like that, that is when we would typically recommend blogging. It depends, some clients want to blog but don’t have anything to talk about so we don’t recommend it.
- From Aaron – I agree with Gini. For a lot of clients its good for them. Sometimes they don’t have the time or the manpower. If the resources and information are there than blogging can be an excellent tool for clients.
Q: Can you give an example of time when tracking engagement lead to developing good new relationships with clients, customers, partners, etc. or strengthened existing ones?
A:
- From Angie – PostRank shows who the ‘big players’ are in your network. Once you take that information and start engaging with that person, that little share becomes a bigger share and they start promoting your work more. Sometimes its hard to see that depending how they tweet, but when I can go in ans see that this person is sharing a lot of work and they have a big network, that is something you can really begin to leverage.
Q: Which additional sources of engagement would the panelists suggest be included in the PostRank algorithm?
A: We currently collect data from over 20 different social networks and hubs. You can find a complete list of all our engagement sources here.
- From Aaron – No suggestions. It has everything we need. Most of the things we track are social bookmarks like Digg and Reddit, but primarily Facebook and Twitter.
- From Angie – I love Stumbleupon, but I already know that PostRank is unable to get access to this data. Other than that, it has everything that I need.
- From Gini – We use Livefyre for our commenting system and even though it syncs to WordPress comments which PostRank tracks, for some reason there is a disconnect so PostRank is not currently tracking our comments, which wouldn’t be a big deal if I weren’t trying to beat a few people in the AdAge Power 150. I’m just slightly competitive. So we’re not getting credit on AdAge for our comments and we get 100-200 comments a day. I would love to see that, but I know it is something PostRank is working on. It is a big thing for us.
Q: Has PostRank shaped the channels that you use to promote blogs through?
A:
- From Aaron – Yes absolutely. Before we would create a lot of blog content and spend a lot time sharing on every social site possible and then we realized that a lot of engagement comes from select sites. We started using those select sites to improve efficiency, just because of the engagement we receive from those sites. We still use a lot of the other social sites, but we don’t see as much value from them. That was something we were able to realize using PostRank.
- From Gini – Yes, this is exactly our experience. For one client, LinkedIn is huge for him and we didn’t realize that until we started looking at PostRank Analytics. One of the big things we started to push this client on was getting him involved in groups and discussions and things like that because we know from PostRank Analytics that a lot of his traffic is coming directly from LinkedIn.
