Today I'm excited to announce the launch of a new feature inside Open Site Explorer—In-App Social & Contact Data.
With this launch, you'll be able to see the
social or email accounts we've discovered associated with a given website, and have one-click access to those pages.
Update: Social & Contact Data is now available as part of the Moz API. More info here.
Initially, the feature offers:
- Availability today on the inbound links tab and in Link Intersect on the "pages -> subdomains" view. In the future, if y'all find it useful, we hope to expand its presence to other areas of the tool as well.
- Email accounts will only be shown if they match the domain name (e.g. [email protected] would be shown next to moz.com, [email protected] would not) and if they appear in standard format on the page (we don't try to grab emails in JavaScript or that use alternate formats to obsfucate).
- We show Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and email addresses we've found on multiple pages of the site (we take a small random set and analyze whether these social/contact data pieces are uniform). If we find multiple accounts, you'll see this:
Use cases
There are three major use cases for this feature (at least for me; you might have more!):
1) Link/Outreach prospecting
It can be a pain to visit sites, find social accounts/emails, and copy them into a spreadsheet or send messages (and recall which ones you have/haven't done yet). By including social/contact data in the same interface where you're doing link analysis, we hope to save you time and clicks.
2) Link/site trust and audience reach analysis
We're actually using this data on the back end at Moz for our upcoming Spam Score feature (coming very soon), but you can use it manually to help with a quick mental filter for trustworthy/authoritative/non-spammy sites, and to get a sense for the size and reach of a site's social audience.
3) At-a-glance analysis of social networks among a group
If you're in a given space (e.g. travel blogs), it's a process to determine which social networks are/aren't being used by industry participants and influencers. Social/contact data in OSE can help with that by showing which social networks various sites are using and linking to from their pages:
We need your feedback
This first implementation is relatively light in the app—we haven't yet placed this data anywhere/everywhere it might be useful. Before we do, we want to hear what you think: Is this useful and valuable to your work? Does it help save you time? Would you want to see the feature expanded and if so, in what sections would it provide the greatest value to you? Please let us know in the comments, and by getting back in touch with us after you've had a chance to try it out for yourself.
Thanks for giving social/contact data a spin, and look for more upgrades to Open Site Explorer in the very near future!
Is this useful and valuable to your work?
I would say that yes it is useful, but I am not sure it delivers the type of value yet that will be hugely impactful for most SEOs. I think your desire to add these to a Spam Score is a very powerful feature.
For example, if you could do a link analysis on a competitor and quickly identify sites in your vertical that link to them (but not to you) and have a large audience reach, on top of high DA, than your link efforts might be much improved.
Does it help save you time?
I would argue that other link building tools have a better focus on time efficiency.
Would you want to see the feature expanded and if so, in what sections would it provide the greatest value to you?
I believe if you created a social power score or metric that helped rank them based on influence (and could also be sorted) that you would have a very powerful feature. Additionally, if you could correlate data from Followerwonk and utilize accordingly there could be great usefulness.
Overall
I believe that this is a great first step to something I believe will be more powerful: Spam Score.
...however...
I believe that as Organic and Social are daily becoming more tightly intertwined if this tool could help identify how DA and SC (social score...I made that up...oops) influence each other and provide insight that helped SEOs better understand their correlation you would have an exceptionally innovative tool.
Thanks for the excellent and detailed feedback Garrett - greatly appreciated.
p.s. Re; links that point to competitors but not to you; if you haven't already, check out https://moz.com/blog/announcing-improved-link-opportunities
Totally Love it Rand!
I love that tool and it has given us the quickest wins of any link building tool out there.
My suggestion would be to add an "audience reach" metric and incorporate that into the "links that point to competitors but not to you" aspect of your tool. It would allow for quicker and MORE INFLUENTIAL wins.
Word. An "audience reach score" would be really slick - maybe something that combines FB/Twitter/G+/LinkedIn/Pinterest/YouTube/Instagram... I'm cooking up all kinds of ideas :-)
For the Social score, FollowerWonk's social authority could be made into OSE? maybe?
Anyhow, great addition. Keep it up! :)
Excellent Feedback Garret
thanks admin
Is this useful and valuable to your work? On a micro level, maybe. Often it takes a hop or two even when having the social data to start a conversation with the right person for a given domain. Still, if it accelerates hop 1, that's good. On a macro level, it's definitely nice to see the clustering of social usage. Kind of fascinating to see if that usage could be even more eye-popping with granular data via follower wonk and such.
Does it help save you time? Probably. My early thought is that it'll be useful in assembling untrusted domains as well, but will need to test. There are plenty of cases where no social is the norm but the links and referrals from those sites are still valuable.
Would you want to see the feature expanded and if so, in what sections would it provide the greatest value to you? This seems like a bit of a silo buster which is very cool. Being able to display a Venn Diagram of how Social, SEO, PR (Fresh Web), Etc., create high marketing engagement overall would be an amazing presentation / information tool. Definitely carrying more of a Moz than Seomoz flavor here.
Venn diagram idea is interesting, but I'm struggling to think of how to build or visualize it - e.g. how would we know which audience overlaps/doesn't? Super cool idea though.
Hmm... One way would be to break it out by contact type and associate contact data across the tools. For example, if Twitter contacts were the overall group, you could have a circle of OSE contacts, overlapping with Fresh Web Explorer sites that have twitter contact data, and Followerwonk off of some recency metric, say the last 30 days. Might look something like this:
https://rquadrant.com/files/images/venn.png
Is this useful and valuable to your work?
Yes. Lately we have been focusing more on social media profiles as an indicator of a "real" site that actually tries to legitimately drive traffic to it's content via it's social media profiles. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is also the three that I feel should also be looked at. Not just social media profiles that have tools to automate all the content sharing on their profiles, but where actual effort is put into the social profiles themselves.
Because I also run a blog of my own on the side (hopefully as part of my full time work in the near future) I know what it takes to properly utilize your social media accounts to drive traffic to content on the site. Any legitimate SEO will have some PR skills in his repertoire, and this will help identify real sites.
Does it help save you time?
Yes, although I think if the data can be used to give a "Influencer Score" of some sort, that combines the interaction content gets on Facebook and Twitter to give you an indication of how "real" the site is and what influence it carries, that would save even more. At the moment we just see that they have Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts, but those could all be fully automated. So I still feel compelled to look at the social profiles myself to gauge interaction with the audience and from the audience on the social media profile.
Would you want to see the feature expanded and if so, in what sections would it provide the greatest value to you?
As explained above with the "Influencer Score", that would be a great expansion. But I also think that the Spam Score is a move in the right direction.
Thanks Ruan - much appreciate the feedback and the additional validation of the social reach/influencer score for sites. I can see how that would make tons of sense.
This is so useful! Makes it much easier to identify and go after the "low hanging fruit" links.
Rand, I haven't had time to try this out, but the ability to see e-mail addresses associated with a domain is potentially very valuable for Moz users, like me, who are sometimes engaged in PR, publicity, or outreach.
Right now, if I want SEO and PR software, I have to pay for both (something like) Moz and (something like) Cision. But if I can go straight into Moz to get e-mail addresses for people that work for a given publication (at that given domain) -- then I might not need to pay for Cision. I'd save a lot of money.
Plus, this would give Moz the ability to corner the market by providing software (and branding itself as) useful for SEOs, PR people, and more. Software such as Cision isn't useful for, say, SEO. It'd be a great UVP!
(Hint, hint... :)
Yup - totally get it. Maybe in the future, we can build in the APIs of companies like Cision to help mark up the data we have from web crawling, too.
Can the initial domain you originally enter be included as well? This would be super helpful for competitor research - put in their domain and get their socials AND their inbound link socials. Really cool feature btw.
Agree on having it exportable. That's pretty much a must-have. I'd love follower numbers on a hover or something but I know it's more difficult to get that on some sites.
That's a really good point - I think we can/should do that, perhaps in the top section with the link metrics.
Follower numbers on hover is, sadly, more challenging and might not be possible because it requires querying the social services for billions of pages to have in our index (or to do so on-demand, which can create bottlenecks and flooding of requests, too). Definitely something we'll keep working on though.
That's great news, speaking of Open Site Explorer, is it possible to have autocomplete function back? If I'm not mistaken it used to work on the other version of OSE (or is it something wrong with my PC?). Thanks
Thanks for the nudge - this isn't currently supported in OSE, but we can definitely add it to the list.
That's a nice feature added to OSE, looking forward to more detailed social profiles information and popular posts like in Buzzsumo
Agreed RE: Popular Posts, even Ahrefs has a BuzzSumo like thing going on. Would be good to see OSE/Moz suite with something comparable.
Hey,
Great job guys!
This feature is great. It will make the outreach (and following) so much easier. Which will probably make my life easier in the near future.
Just 1 question - any way to download the social information. I tried with the CSV report, but for now this info is now included.
p.s.: Currently packing some beers and sending them your way, Rand. Cheers!
Thats is certainly something that could be useful. However, how do OSE about a subpage which is essentially a blog post but with lots of social links and phone numbers?
It could be a post about G+ or how to professionally write your phonenumber making it easy to read. Just pointing out the obvious which I guess OSE already accounts for.
But great to see an added feature to a great tool!
This is an interesting feature, however after trying it out in my account just now found that zero information appeared. Are there any known bugs in this tool?
Great feature!
Would there be any way to add something to the link opportunities feature that lets you put in a bigger list of competitors and it automatically compares them all to eachother one by one? This would save me time as I generally make a list of competitors and then select one from the list and go down the list comparing it and then do the same process for each competitor in the list.
An example would be that i'd have the following list:
Competitor 1, Competitor 2, Competitor 3, Competitor 4
I'd go through the list and compare Competitor 1 to Competitor 2 and then Competitor 1 to Competitor 3 and so on. I'd then compare Competitor 2 to Competitor 3, etc. I do this for the whole list and it would be much better, and save me more time if I could put in a larger list and have it do this for me :)
I hope this makes sense!
Yes! That's something we've been asked about before in the link intersect feature, and I believe it is possible (though we'll need to build a queueing system, as the results can take a long while to return for multiple, simultaneous queries).
Sweet!
When you export the CSV file, it doesn't seem to include the in-app social and contact data. Is there another way to go about getting this information in a spreadsheet?
Hi
I just checked my own site but the found linked social profiles are my private ones. Where do you get the social contact informations or where do I have to link my site to my business profiles?
Cheers, Mathias
Hi all,
as you said this tool is going to collect data for your upcoming Spam Score feature, as far as you know does Google the same? In other words, I know that in theory a site with contact info will rank better, but the site without any contact info goes to a sort of sandbox of spammy sites?
In addition, I have found so many sites with contact info that won't reply no matter what you do, they don't reply.
It's the not because of the way you contact ,a s you can use work email of well-known brand and offer a bespoke contest, product to test, articles or whatsoever, they won't reply. Why this kind of websites has to rank?
Thanks,
PP
Rand, hey buddy. I ran Seer through the tool, and maybe the functionality is less helpful for a company like ours, or yours. But I found that the articles in big publications, email addresses typically didn't get the individual author, so like our link from mashable, shows that [email protected] is the email address associated with it. If I emailed that addy, more than likely I wouldn't get much of a response. Then for forbes, we didn't get email addresses at all. I would love to pull the individual over the pub, especially because many individuals write for several publications. If you could ever take the top 100 pubs and scrape their article format and author pages, you might end up being able to address this issue. Same for the twitter handles, if I thank @forbes for writing about Seer, that is good, but I think if I thank the author who wrote it, it helps to establish a deeper relationship.
I ran a few clients through the tool and also thought maybe building a black list over time could eliminate some of the noise, like youtube, reddit, scoop.it, etc.
Where this obviously helps the most is for individual blogs that might not be too heavily multi-author. That brought up some real value there!!
Thanks for taking our feedback.
Is it possible to have this data appear in the CSV export? I just tried an export and the social data was not in it?
Thanks for sharing! excelent article!
Excellent Rand!
Anything to save time is welcome.View all we have linked to our site with a single click is a significant time saver for people who have a lot of work.
So far he had not decided me to try a program of offering these services, but it's true it really is good.We will have to try it ...
Great functionality soon put into practice. Thank You !!
It is fantastic Rand, Congratulatios and thanks for sharing the link!
Hey Rand,
Congrats for adding a useful and time-saver feature in OSE! Is it technically possible to show the number of shares that particular link received? Something like buzzsumo does?
Hi Rand,
Like always, it's a great feature. It will save a lot of time specially in outreaching campaign.
Thanks Moz Team for great features.
P.S. I am now waiting for Spam Score feature.
wow its really nice tool to check the score of social sharing and other thing. and I also agree with you if the social accounts could be somehow displayed with the levels of engagement on posts/with the account then it would do a lot for showing the true value of each social account.
Thanks Moz Team for great features.
Its good to see that you added such a beneficial feature in the site. It will help me to find social links on it. thanks
Cool ! Thats really a great news. Already I checked it & I love this feature. I think, People will love it. :D Moz team are always RokZs! But i am really unhappy about social metrics of OSE. I saw there, thats not correct result. :( Is it possible to fix this issue ?
Hi Tafser! Thanks for the note -- we're so glad you love the feature!
With regard to the social metrics in OSE, would you mind writing a quick email to [email protected], and including the details of what isn't correct? We certainly want to know if there's something wrong, and our Help Team is the best group to dive into what you've found.
Thanks again!
This could be really useful for saving time with outreach. Really looking forward to the upcoming Spam Score! I agree with RuanF - if the social accounts could be somehow displayed with the levels of engagement on posts/with the account then it would do a lot for showing the true value of each social account.
This looks awesome Rand. This is going to be extremely useful for those of use that are tasked with growing our clients social media presence as well as doing their seo, this will help reduce a lot of the research time needed to connect with the movers and shakers in the client's industry.
Nice post, thanks to sharing
wow its really nice tool to check the score of social sharing and other thing. i am regular user of moz tool and i prefer it more then any other SEO tool.
Its really helpful post and love the moz community
hi,cool! that really good topic and also glad. thanks to sharing.