PostRank™

 

PostRank’s suite of tools for monitoring, measuring and analyzing social engagement with online content have been proven useful for companies and organizations of different sizes and areas of expertise. Unsurprisingly, many of our customers and avid users are entrepreneurs, just like our founder, Ilya Grigorik, and indeed, by extension, everyone here on the PostRank team.

About a month ago, I had the pleasure of being introduced to a brilliant entrepreneur by the name of Natalie Sisson. Natalie is a Suitcase Entrepreneur and adventurer who travels the world running her business from anywhere while literally living out of a suitcase. As a former co-founder of a technology startup herself, Natalie loves demystifying tools and cutting through the technical jargon to show others how to find and use the right tools to streamline their business and save time and money.

I was incredibly excited to learn that Natalie would be including PostRank in an exciting and timely e-book called: The Ultimate Toolkit for Evolutionary Entrepreneurs. The Customer Development team here was so thrilled about this opportunity that we decided to sponsor the digital publication.

The e-book is a simple yet powerful guide, designed not to overwhelm but to help entrepreneurs immensely. Every tool outlined has been made easy to understand and organized by function, price and ideal business use. This clear and concise digital publication can help:

• Create professional marketing campaigns for less
• Optimize your website to attract more of the right customers
• Better understand your customers’ needs
• Do more of the important stuff in less time
• Master cost-effective self-promotion
• Create multiple streams of income on your website
• Track and monitor your social media return on investment
• And much much more!

While reading through the e-book myself I discovered some amazingly useful tools I only ever dreamed existed. Natalie has done a fantastic job at discovering and providing succinct overviews of some of the many free and paid tools for website building and optimization, personal productivity and time management, marketing design and public relations, social media management, and other facets of running a small business that matter to entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial. The Ultimate Toolkit for Evolutionary Entrepreneurs is a great resource: check it out.

Today we’re rolling out a face lift to our Analytics service. These changes take into account community questions, feedback, and how we’ve observed the service being used since we launched it in September 2009.

Folks who have recently signed up for our Connect service can login to Analytics with their Connect account email and password here.

Account Navigation

In a nutshell, we’ve moved navigation up to the top right of the page where you login, and have separated and clarified working with the types of content you can track.

My Analytics is now Blogs, and within that section, the Overview, Analyze, and other tab names remain the same.

Custom Pages is now Pages, and is now a top-level navigation item, rather than a sub-section.

The various account-related functions under My Sites are now found under Account, which is a top-level navigation item, rather than several sub-sections.

New navigation:

(Click on the image to view a larger version.)

Old navigation:

(Click on the image to view a larger version.)

Blogs

One big change in this section is that Pages is no longer a sub-section and has been moved. (More on that below.)

Engagement Events and Engagement Scores metrics remain the same, as they provide the most depth and precision for publishers to learn and improve their content’s performance with their audiences.

The PostRank score “chiclet” (with a red, orange, or yellow background) has been removed from the Blogs section, as more detailed and precise metrics to judge a story’s performance with your audience are already displayed. Additionally, there was often confusion over the scores and an assumption that they represented absolute analysis, when in fact they were relative.

We have also removed the Sort By functions for publish date or most recent engagement activity.

Pages

We’ve given this section some love, since our research showed that while we were getting plenty of ”I want to be able to do this…” inquiries, many people weren’t actually finding or understanding that a section already existed with the features they were looking for.

(Click on the image to view a larger version.)

The former Custom Pages section is now Pages and has moved into a new section. Once you’re there the title is now Your Tracked Pages. Previously this content was accessible from the Analyze tab in its own sub-section, and you could add up to 20 custom pages per site (site = RSS-enabled blog or other website you’d added to your account).

All existing account holders’ Pages have been migrated into the new system.

Now, Influencer account holders (those who’ve signed up for the Connect service) and Personal account holders (Analytics only, our smallest size account) will be able to add up to 20 Pages.

Business and Agency account holders will be able to add up to 40 Pages.

These changes to Page limits will not affect existing customers (i.e. you won’t lose any that you already have).

We’ve also added the Track Another Page function to the Pages overview, and have added the Edit Settings function for each Page to make it really easy to update your content.

For the social engagement analysis of Pages, Google Analytics on-site pageview data will no longer be displayed. There are a couple of technical reasons for this, but the main one is that members often add Pages for competitive analysis or interest purposes, but as the members are not the sites’ administrators, they don’t have access to the associated Google Analytics account to access the on-site data, so this feature becomes moot.

The “chiclet” that contains PostRank scores (with a red, orange, or yellow background) has also been removed, since much more detailed metrics are displayed, and the Engagement Score is a much more precise metric to quickly judge a story’s performance with your audience.

Account

Account details have now been re-organized under the Account section, which includes all of your contact information, password settings, referral functions, social profiles, and billing information.

(Click on the image to view a larger version.)

The Your Details section (formerly My Details) has moved up a level in navigation. This section contains your contact information (name, email, etc.), password settings, unique referral code, and the email referral tool. (The referral code and email referral will appear on paid Analytics accounts only.)

Your Social Accounts (formerly Associated Accounts) is where you verify your Facebook account, and will be where you can add additional social network profiles in the future.

Your Payment Details retains its name and functionality and is where paid account holders will see their credit card information. Non-paying customers (i.e. Connect service members) will not see this section.

Cancel Account retains the same name and functionality, and is also found under the Account section.

Let us know what you think

Let us know your thoughts, questions, or feedback on the new navigation and presentation of Analytics. And, of course, we’re always interested in hearing about new features you want.

And yes, we know there are a few requests we’ve received that we haven’t been able to implement, but rest assured that our development team has explored all of them, and if the feature hasn’t been built, it’s likely because the tools we’d need aren’t yet available or our system just can’t support it yet. But when that changes, we’ll do our best to add all of that good stuff.

 

The explosive use of social media in conjunction with this year’s Canadian federal election campaign and coverage is unlike any before it. Since the election kicked off, we’ve been monitoring and measuring how people on the social web interact with content about the major political parties. Using precise URL-based monitoring techniques, PostRank is revealing, through a series of weekly blog posts on our Insights Blog, the ability of the parties’ messages to elicit tweets, comments, social bookmarks and other events by the social electorate.

“We’re all about social data at PostRank. When the election was announced, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a closer look at how the social web was responding to online content produced by and about political parties, their platforms and their leaders,” said Carol Leaman, CEO of PostRank, “We’ve discovered fascinating information that tells an interesting story about this election that you won’t hear from the pollsters.”

Recent data from comScore revealed that Canadians spend more time online that any other nation. Clearly, what is happening online during this election is of major interest to the political parties as well as the media covering the election. These groups and the electorate want to know how the use of social media is changing election campaigns and whether or not its influence is real. Using precise monitoring and analysis techniques, we can begin to get unbiased answers to some of those questions.

Focusing on online content – the articles and stories containing party messages about their platforms and leaders – we’ve pulled together a host of data. These metrics include the number of articles referencing party platform messages, the performance of these articles on the social web in terms of their ability to generate interaction and engagement, viral lift, and the reach of all this content across the social web. Each blog post we publish over the course of the election campaign will highlight these and other unique facets of data. Here’s a quick overview of the politically themed posts we’ve published so far – including a couple pre-election posts:

• Canada’s Tories Outnumber Opponents in Traditional Media Mentions
• Top 15 Shared Articles: The Reach of the Conservatives’ Platform
• Top 15 Shared Articles: The Reach of the NDP Platform
• Top 15 Shared Articles: The Reach of the Liberals’ Platform
• 4 Weeks to Canada’s Vote: The Party’s Reach with the Social Electorate
• Liberals are the Best at Reaching Canada’s Social Electorate
• Canada’s Election: Tories Lead in SM Numbers, Liberals Attract more SM Attention
• Canada Votes in 5 Weeks: The Parties Pitch for the Social Electorate
• Socially Famous Canadian Ministers: Lawrence Cannon, Stephen Harper, Tony Clement
• Liberal Party of Canada: The Most Social Canadian Political Party

Social media will continue to figure prominently in this, the 41st Canadian federal election. PostRank data speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the parties’ messages at engaging people on social networks and hubs.

 

Promotional support for this blog post has been provided by CNW.

CNW connects organizations to relevant news audiences through integrated, intelligent communications and disclosure services. CNW offers newswire distribution, social media releases, webcast, video, photography, translation, regulatory filing services and MediaVantage, a web-based media monitoring application, communications and workflow solutions. CNW has been an industry leader since 1960. www.newswire.ca.

 

 

 

Thank you to everyone who participated in our webinar last week. Here’s a recording of the webinar for those who missed it:

Using PostRank Analytics to Improve Your Blogging from PostRank Inc. on Vimeo.

The article that Jason mentioned that talks about Mashable’s success and “evergreen content”: How Mashable Won.

For an additional end-to-end overview of PostRank Analytics: PostRank Analytics Demo.

For individual publishers, check out our PostRank Connect service: PostRank Connect. (Accounts come with a free PostRank Analytics account.)

If you’re a brand or company, contact us to discuss how you can develop relationships with publishers through PostRank Connect!

Questions from the webinar

Q: Can we connect getclicky.com analytics? I don’t use Google Analytics.

A: At this time, only Google Analytics is integrated with PostRank Analytics, though recently Webtrends announced PostRank integration in their Analytics 10 product.

Q: Do you have your own PostRank Analytics vs. Google?

A: PostRank Analytics covers off-site metrics on the social web (so your audience’s activities on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.), and Google Analytics cover on-site metrics (pageviews, bounce rates, time on site, etc.) These days, 80% of a site’s engagement comes from the social web – so tracking offsite analytics is increasingly important.

Q: Can you did a little deeper into the optimize aspect of PR?

A: There is a section in the Analytics overview about Optimize. Basically, it gives you the “flavour” of popular social networks and their cultures, as well as who your biggest champions are on each and what content of yours they’re posting, sharing, etc.

Q: Can you provide the Yahoo Cornell study details again. and Q: Where can we see its findings about “evergreen” content?

A: That data is all in the article Jason referenced: How Mashable Won.

Q: Wait. I’m sorry. Jason just mentioned where there are some optimization tips and tricks.

A: In Analytics under the Optimize tab, you can see, for example, your top influencers on Twitter: who they are, how many followers they have, and what content of yours they’ve (re)tweeted. You can then track their influence and sharing over time, as well as across networks, which really gives you a fuller picture of who your content’s champions are. You can also get a sense of what topics or styles of posts resonate most with those people, and, most importantly, build relationships with them to get their feedback and encourage even more engagement with your content.

And, of course, reciprocation is one of a blogger’s best tools. You want comments, trackbacks, retweets, diggs, etc., right? One of the best ways to get them is to give them. Read what others are writing, leave your own thoughtful comments. Share cool articles with your Twitter network. Bookmark posts and tag them well so others can find them and use them as resources.

Q: Could you display an exploded view of the engagement points section of the report?

A: For a closer view of engagement points, you can check out our Analytics overview. Feel free to contact us with additional questions about how engagement works, or if you have questions about seeing the breakdown for your own content.

For those who attended or who watch the recording, please let us know what you thought about the webinar by completing this quick poll.

 

Had a chance to chat with Josh Owens from webpulp.tv a few weeks back about our experience of scaling PostRank and all the associated services that power it under the hood. If you’re interested to learn about the technology behind PostRank, definitely check it out:

In terms of topics covered: what is PostRank, Solr/Lucene, Eventmachine, AMQP, Cassandra, Goliath and a variety of other topics. Fun conversation, thanks Josh!