Thursday, January 12, 2012

Breaking Down Online Influence and Impact

Today I'm focusing on influence and impact measurements. No, I'm not talking about Klout or PeerIndex - they aggregate influence. I'm looking at two other tools - Vizify TweetSheet and bit.ly - that can help you finetune your message and improve your marketing.

NOTE: Tools that enable a deep dive into your content's effectiveness come and go quickly. One such tool, BackType that showed the impact of your blog posts across Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and more was acquired by Twitter in July 2011 and shuttered.

Bit.ly

One of the oldest ways to measure your content's impact across multiple channels, including Twitter or Facebook, is bit.ly. With bit.ly, you can shorten URLs and track how many people click through. You can look at your total clicks for the past 30 days, past 14 days, past 7 days, past 24 hours, or past hour. In this time frame, bit.ly shows where the clicks came from by site and country.


For a given link, you can also view how many of the total clicks for a given URL were a result of your tweet or Facebook update, whether any conversations were started, which sites referred your link, and what countries the referrals came from. By reviewing this information for all of your links, you can get an idea of which content does better on what channels.

NOTE: If you're using Google Analytics, don't expect bit.ly to show up as a traffic source - Twitter, Facebook, etc are still the traffic source.

Vizify TweetSheet

A better tool for measuring your impact on Twitter, is Vizify TweetSheet. A quick disclosure is needed before I proceed, my brother-in-law is one of the founders of Vizify. For the past 12 months, up to 3,200 tweets, Vizify shows your volume and the number of retweets in a bar chart. Vizify then breaks this information down further, identifying the most re-tweeted posts (something you have to dig for with bit.ly), your geographical impact, and your best followers.

What tools are you using to analyze the influence and impact of your content?

Happy Analyzing!
Eden
 
Credits: All images taken by Eden Hensley Silverstein for The Road to the Good Life.