One of the greatest values of the social web for publishers is its power to keep content “evergreen”. Just because a post was published a year ago, if it contains interesting, relevant content, someone could discover it anew at any time, share it, and it can get noticed by a whole new audience.
Publishers also know that people who come to their sites already engaged with the content tend to stay longer, read more, and come back, which helps them grow reach and influence.
These content truths help explain why additional sorting and filtering functionality have been our most-requested features since we launched PostRank Analytics.
By default posts are sorted and displayed by publication date — the most recent content appears first. But if an older post is getting engagement, publishers want to know about it, to be able to engage with the conversation, and perhaps point readers to additional relevant content.
We get it, so today we’re launching new sorting and filtering functionality!
When you’re logged in to your Analytics account, once you navigate to a site’s Analyze view, you can now sort either by publication date or by activity.
Clicking the activity option will display posts in the order of most recent engagement. So if a post just got a new tweet or digg, it’ll be at the top, even if it doesn’t necessarily have the most engagement overall. Doesn’t matter if it’s a new post getting its first engagement, or an older post getting new life thanks to the social web.
We also know that on sites with multiple authors, comparing the content’s engagement as a whole might not always provide the most relevant picture. Publishers also want to know which topics they cover that tend to be the most popular. Not a problem. In the same site Analyze view, you can now filter posts by the author that wrote them, by topic tags, or both.
Where do the topic tags come from? From the most relevant source there is — you! When you published your posts, you added descriptive tags or topic categories to make your content more organized and searchable.
When we gather and analyze your content, we collect those tags and display them in a drop-down field for you to use in filtering posts. It works the same way for authors; it’s just names instead of topics. (For those publishers who have not been using tags or category topics, we recommend enabling that in your blog platform or CMS.)
There are lots of cool ways you can use these features to beef up your knowledge of how your content is doing with your audience.
- Make new connections with readers by seeing what posts have gotten the most recent engagement, and, using info from the Activity stream, contacting them and get a conversation going or answer questions.
- Filtering by author and tag, publishers can compare their engagement when writing about a specific topic to other authors’ engagement when writing about similar topics. Who’s getting more engagement from the audience? Is the key writing style, data presentation, or another factor?
- Filter by topic, either for a single author or group. Do posts about taking photos get as much engagement as posts about editing photos? Do readers seem to love lists posts, no matter what they’re about? Get an insider’s view of how your audience ticks, and learn from that how to increase your engagement.
You know your content better than anyone, and now PostRank Analytics offers functionality to help you see the hard data to prove your intuition, help you see new trends, and make even stronger, more influential audience connections.