If you’re a publisher, you likely know, or at least suspect, that many of the conversations about your content are happening off your site. In fact, we’ve measured it, and off site engagement represents over 80% of all audience activity. Not surprisingly, where there is conversation and engagement, there is opportunity to generate traffic, build brand awareness, and develop rapport with your audience. Or is there?
PostRank currently tracks engagement activities on over two dozen social networks, and we are always looking to add more sources to enrich the signal. When MySpace opened up their APIs a few months ago, we were one of the first to integrate their full stream into our trackers.
Likewise, we were really excited about the buzz around Google Buzz (pardon the pun), as it meant more social engagement data that we could integrate into our system. Which we did. PostRank now tracks all of the public Buzz feeds. However, after doing some careful data analysis, the quality of the Buzz feeds is, well, questionable.
Turns out, approximately 60% of the content on Buzz is from Twitter! Many users have hooked up their accounts to automatically repost their content from Twitter either directly, through FriendFeed, or via another service.
The runner up to Twitter? Another set of bots! This time, it’s automated alerts from feeds, e.g. CNN publishes a new story and a bot pushes it out to the Buzz stream. All in all, those two sources account for almost 90% of the Buzz stream, and even in the remainder there is a long tail of Google Latitude updates, ping.fm, and others. Unfortunately, there just doesn’t seem to be much original and/or human-generated content in Buzz. Perhaps you shouldn’t hurry to install that Buzz button on your site just yet…
Not all engagement events are the same. There are different types of engagement, which is something that PostRank has taken into account since the beginning. But even beyond that, we all intuitively understand that not every comment, tweet, or bookmark is equal — a comment from an influencer is arguably worth a lot more than from your buddy who has no knowledge of the topic being discussed, both in terms of adding to the conversation and in drawing others into it.
That second ranking step is what we’re working on at PostRank today, and in the process, we are dealing with many edge cases like the robot party on Buzz. So, if you see Buzz mentions in your analytics, but are wondering why the engagement is low — that’s why. Unfortunately, Asimov’s laws didn’t take social engagement into account.