Search Marketing Sage

Google Analytics Social Reporting continues to grow and provide insights into how social media is tying into your company’s goals. Last summer, I wrote about the recently introduced Social Visitors Flow, Social Sources and Activity Stream, and Social Plugins Reports. On Tuesday, Google Analytics announced that they redesigned some of the social reports to make it easier to see the activity happening around your content. The two new reports that were introduced are: Trackbacks and Data Hub Activity. Both of which were already previously available.

These reports already existed, so what’s the big deal? Google developed these two new stand-alone reports to provide greater ease in digesting this data. The data is clearer and now, you can drill down through this data separately.

Google Analytics has added a new suite of free social media reporting for monitoring and measurement tools and resources. Social Visitors Flow, which displays much like Visitors Flow, shows how visitors from social properties arrived at your site and their actions upon arrival. Did they drop off or navigate to a specific page on your site?

Earlier this month, we mentioned some of the new Facebook changes  including Timeline, Friend groups and a couple tweaks to Facebook advertising. In the past few weeks, Facebook has continued to announce many changes to its interface, reporting system, ad and API structure. Some of the changes have already been implemented, but a few are still on their way.

Community managers and Facebook marketers alike may have noticed they have the option to view old Insights or the new and improved Insights tool.

With the improved Insights tool, Pages are able to:

• See the reach of their posts on Facebook, not limited to their Facebook fans
• See weekly total reach of a Page, total Likes, Friends of Fans number, public and internal Pages metric and “Talking About This”
• See what content is reaching the most people on Facebook and data to increase the virility of the posts, photos, videos, questions

  

Along with thorough keyword research, content editing, social media participation and inbound linking, link requesting is one tactic to consider as a part of a holistic search engine optimization strategy. Since I’ve been requesting links, I’ve gathered a few pointers to keep in mind before I click Send for any request. Especially if you’re just embarking on your link requesting strategy these 10 tips should help you at least get started. 

1. Monitor use of your name or brand.

With tools like Google Alerts or Trackur you can be updated when you or your brand is mentioned in a post. Those are the posts you should pursue.

2. Search specifically for your press release titles.

You press releases already SHOULD have targeted keywords within them.  When press releases are republished on blogs your links might be stripped out. Go ahead and ask for the most relevant  link to be added back into the release.

3. Coordinate with your search team.

If you’re on the social media end, like myself, ask your SEO team members or refer to your keyword list to see if any relevant keywords are mentioned within the article. I recommend asking just for links to keywords that are already within the post. Asking the author to re-word the article for a link is a double favor. Don’t count on that one.

The last session of the day is titled Search, PR, and Reputation.  Speakers for this session included Todd Firesen, Kristjan Mar Jauksson, and Max Thomas.  Some of the most important messages from the session are below.

Big question: is social the new search?  The panel feels, “yeah, it kinda is.”