In two weeks, we'll be making the first spots available for the beta of a highly anticipated (and heavily requested) feature: social media analytics inside the PRO web app. The beta will launch with Facebook and Twitter, and in months to come we may add LinkedIn and Google+. For now, though, we'd love to get up to 1,000 beta testers into the service - we need to run for ~1 month to study how the data collection performs and scales before we release it to everyone using PRO (14K+ accounts and 30K+ campaigns).
Here's the link to the survey & signup. Just fill that out and when we're ready, we'll start adding you to the beta. Note that we might not be able to include everyone in the private beta, and it may be a trickle (50-100 accounts) in the first week or two (starting the first week of October).
The social analytics feature is designed to track:
- Growth of your Twitter + Facebook accounts
- Traffic from Facebook + Twitter (via connection to Google Analytics)
- Key metrics from Twitter:
- Followers
- Retweets
- Most Retweeted Content
- @ Replies
- @ Mentions
- Interaction Analysis (see screenshot below)
- Key metrics from Facebook:
- Fans
- Likes
- Fan Posts (quantity of posts on your wall by fans)
- Mentions (any post to your wall that mentions your page's name)
- Admin Posts (your posts)
- Comparison of your FB/Twitter accounts against Competitors (for public data like fans/followers)
Over time, there may be more functionality as well, but we wanted to start by tracking some of the key reach metrics that we've seen carry value (I mentioned a bunch of these in my post on social media KPIs).
Here's a bunch of screenshots (note that some of these aren't finalized nor showing all the features):
Hopefully, you're as excited as we are. If so, we'd love to have you join the beta by signing up here!
Once we've done some thorough testing, we hope to have this rolled out to everyone using the web app in November, and will be iterating and improving thereafter. Thanks for all the support, and big kudos to the Moz engineering + product teams, who've put together something pretty damn cool here :-)
On first glance I like this a lot but I have one concern.
From SEOMOZ your last Webinar and a recent post on this topic you have shown very clearly that social can give you short and medium term bumps and I particularly liked the suggested search change - would love that -
Just hope people don't get sucked into exclusively looking at their social stats at the expense of the hard work in other places.
My list of tools and techniques since I joined this forum is exploding and with this I need at some stage to take stock and see which one I should focus on most.
Well done to you guys for putting this together - I look forward to seeing the tool and using it - begging dog look and whimpering noise -
Totally hear you. We don't want to push social at the expense of other things (and I agree that search traffic is still generally higher quality and there's more of it; though social can now help with SEO in a lot of ways). Other features we're actively working on include:
And probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. A lot of these are challenging, multi-engineer products, but the focus through the end of the year is fairly heavy on SEO-focused features, with some additions in other areas, too. Eventually, we want to hit search, social and content as the three major analytics areas, so this is a step in that direction.
Hope that helps give more visibility on our direction!
Right, but a lot of companies want to see Social Media reach now, which this will help with. It's not the only thing, but it's predominate also it drives sales. I was working for a ecomm site and drove sales up by about 30% just by working the social media angle granted in terms of SEO it's short term, but if your ecomm and want sales it can have a long term effect and create dedicated users.
Kudos to the SEOMoz team for bringing this to beta. Nice to see such metrics and the optional tie-in with GA.
There is a subtle element that is important for social media analytics. It's not just about traffic, but rather influence.
How your social connections are accelerating and momentum.
I could have my tweet retweeted to 10,000 twitter accounts, but if none of those twitter accounts are influential, then it's useless.
It would be great if the data could be tied back to a Google analytics milestone, for example and capture that relationship.
I'm so impatient to see what you are going to offer, but I'll miss the beta test - I don't have to provide valuable feedback and it is pointless to apply just for have access. It will be better if someone else take the spot.
Anyway, from what I'm seen on the screenshots it looks very simple and easy to use!
P.S: Damn, it's so tempting... moz is like a drug to me :)
Analytics is very disappointing when it comes to social metrics, other than +1. Glad to see Moz jumping on this and I will use the snot out of it if approved for beta. #thatisall
I just threw a thumbs up at you because you used the # in a comment, which just makes me smile. #thanksforthat
What really scares me is finding myself using hash tags in text messages now. #outlook #grim #friends #fedup!
Really excited for this, there's definitely a demand and a gap in the industry to be filled. I'm slightly surprised that SEOmoz is getting so committed to social, but happy because you guys would be my first choice from the way you present and provide data. Would like to see a SocialMoz blog to go with it ;) (Or even a social-specific conference).
Judging from CloudForce london (the Salesforce event) - they've re-aligned their entire business to be "social enterprise focused" - so I think it makes sense,
Looks promising. This looks to be an extensive tool covering a lot of features and permutations.
I have just built my own tool which tracks daily Social Media activity - for Twitter, Facebook and Google + for our websites and our competition (up to 3 competitors).
The main challenge that I still face is to get wildcard data on the whole domain and not on specific URLs.
For example I can create a campaign for my homepage and my competitors homepages. Or key landing pages vs competitor landing pages. I can create as many of these 'campaigns' as I wish.
However overall data across the entire domain looks to be impossible according at least to Facebook API documentation.
If you have conquered this solution, then I would me most intrigued to find out how, or at least to test drive your beta version.
More than happy to share my extensive code and examples with you guys. Let me know, and we'll hook up.
Can't wait. We use Raven for this now, would be great to replace it ;)
Absolutely. GetClicky, Raven, Hootsuite.. we need to raise the bar.
Looks great - can't wait to have a play with it.
Same here. Would love to have a tinker too :)
Nice work guys! Will be interesting to see this tool compare the SEO benefits, at the moment we've got GA hooked up to Salesforce and Radian6 - that allows us to track leads and the conversation itself, but obv not compare it to the SEO benefit, which I think is really a logical next step.
Keep it up Rand & Team!
Rob
ps I think this is my first comment in 6 months - sorry for being absent!
I want in please.
Would love to take a shot. Any chance that you may choose to plug in Omniture as well?
We've talked to some folks at Adobe about getting access, but have heard that approval there takes a while. Maybe 2012 or 2013, unfortunately.
Can't wait! Looks like an extremely powerful tool already.
Thank goodness for the Moz! Looking forward to seeing you here in Charlotte on Oct. 3-4, Rand!
Jay
I've signed up - fingers crossed!
It looks really nice i cant wait to test it
Shweeeeet! Very excited for this!!
Hey Rand, are you guys going to develop your own metrics to measure impact/influence or leave that to folks like Klout, Crowdbooster, PeerIndex e.t.c.?
Also, when can we expect to see these metrics/tools implemented in the browser toolbar?
Thanks.
We're considering it. We'd like something that correlates well with the boost in rankings or traffic that a particular user's influence can provide, and currently, none of the major services appear to do that. However, it's a big, expensive project, so might not be hihg priority for now.
We don't have a date planned for integrating social data into the toolbar, but early 2012 would probably be a conservative estimate. : )
Sounds exciting! How 'real-time' / frequently will the data be updated?
At beta launch, we'll be updating things like follower/mention/reply/retweet counts daily. Certain things, such as detailed interaction lists, will be updated every six hours. During the beta process, we'll see whether we need to tune things, in order to balance recent-ness of data against not being throttled by the various APIs we depend upon.
Absolutely great post
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Guys! We are really excited about this news. We just attended your social media webinar effecting ranking and link juice! We have been just messing about with this the last couple of days and have been VERY impressed with the results so far. Being able to track our results will be awesome...
Thank you for all you do...
Baker Bay Bead Co.
Will we be able to monitor the web for activity with this as well? For example, if I want to monitor for specific terms and get alerts when they show up in the blogosphere, etc, will this be possible?
We're growing the functionality of Blogscape (currently in labs) to be able to do this. Eventually, we hope to have a much better version of Google Alerts, but it won't be out with this release.
Wow that is really great news for all SEOmoz fans. Can't wait to see social dashboard. Thanks Rand for this update.
Cant ait to check it out !
Excellent news, Rand, the SEOmoz SEOcampaign toolbox is getting bigger and better. Here's looking forward to trying the new social media monitoring features and tools. Will they have a 'download reports' feature element too?
Report downloads will not be available for the initial release of the social tool, unfortunately, but it will be added in shortly after!
that looks and sounds great and poweful..more and more tools to make work easier and effective... thank you! can't wait to be a ProMember and try it (when available) :D
Signed up, sounds fun, fun, fun. :)
This is going to be great stuff! The Webinar yesterday was a perfect launch pad to get people excited about this, as well as KPI tracking for social media. Very anxious to look this over for our agency and get it tied into our social teams' work - somehow.. :)
Sounds Great!, now will this tool be able to listen & manage multiple accts for an ad agency type of environment?
Have signed up for the trial Rand will look forward for the BETA test. Great work SEOmoz team it will be interesting to see how this tool stacks up aggainst the competition.
Looks like a great (and ever more important) addition to the tool-set. Lots of nice features by the look of it. Good work guys!
Very interesting release guys - it looks really good (though I think I'll miss the Beta before I go Pro again sadly).
I've only ever used the moz tools, Raven and Majestic since starting to learn SEO about five years ago (old!), yet I've never been able to fully let go of any one tool. IMO Raven and SEOmoz are always vying for top position - big developments from you both recently as well.
I can feel a Youmoz post brewing...
Anyway, excellent addition from the look of things!
can not wait... Good work SEOMOZ team. Look great...
oh this looks great! can't wait to try it!
This is so exciting. We've actually been looking for a tool that does this exact thing! We've taken a few free trials, signed up for tools, and then left them because they just didn't do what we wanted. AND NOW... you guys are relesing the very thing we've been looking for.
Thank you seomoz!
Wow this stuff looks like it's going to be really powerful!
Thanks for giving us the oppertunity to help test it.
Can I jump in early and bagsy a beta spot for the task list feature if/when that has one? ;p
The competitor engagement analysis is probably the coolest part of this. The rest of it... I guess it might be a good consolidation of metrics, but this data is all available from tools we already use, like bit.ly, Crowdbooster, and the proprietary social networks functions.
At any rate, I'm looking forward to upcoming new features! I'm always impressed with what SEOmoz puts out, so I'd imagine with some more development, I'll be just as impressed with this tool. :)
*braces self for flood of down-thumbs*
Hey Mitch! I think you make a really good point - we def know a lot of tools have some of the monitoring data already, but this social analytics beta is definitely the first step in a very broad and important direction for the SEOmoz PRO software. Let's just say this is v1 of some big ideas :) Meanwhile we want to make sure we push things out as they are ready, get tons of feedback and iterate fast. Thanks for pointing this out though, its important we all stay realistic about our goals with this first push, and then its up to us to keep impressing you guys with further versions as well :)
Agreed that this isn't presenting a ton of features that no one else has; but it sucks to have to use SEOmoz for 4 things, Export.ly + Excel for 3 more, GA for another 2, Bit.ly to track something else... You get the idea. Our goal is to make it so that all the critical metrics you need to track around search, social + content are in one place, and then leverage that combination of data to give you insights and recommendations you couldn't have otherwise.
Our marketing team does a lot of this manually today; pulling metrics from 10 different sources and combinining in email/Excel to report/compare/analyze. We don't think that's very efficient, so we're trying to solve it with our software.
Right, a good consolidation of metrics, at any rate. And I hear what Joanna says about it being the first step in the right direction.
Really, efficiency is one of the main separations between modestly effective SEOs/SM managers and very successful ones. I like the consolidation aspect and the one or two unique features the PRO dashboard presents, but, like I said, I'm definitely looking forward to see what new and exciting things you'll be adding to future versions. :)
It is exactly this holistic approach to the SEO landscape that puts SEOmoz at the top of the pile for me.
Debilz - moz is like a drug to me :)
I used to say the same, but now I think it's more like oxygen! :)
Sha
Really really a great news... I agree with you Rand: it is nice to have to use just one tool to see the most important metrics for an SEO... surely the twitter and facebook ones were missing right now.
In a Social Dashboard 2.0 will SEOmoz implement the use of the Google Plus APIs (even though now they are quite basic)?
Ciao
Hi gflorelli1 -- Yes, we do plan to use the Google Plus API in a future version of the Social Dashboard. : )
Can't wait to see the social dashboard. Thanks Seomoz. This is going to be really cool.
Social dashboard is going to be awesome and I guess SEOmoz tool will become more helpful for SEOs and especially the people who offer Social Media services to clients…
Waiting for it! Like anything! :) Good Work SEOmoz!
You guys alwasy do a great job of increasing the value of SEOmoz with very usefull tools. I can't wait to see this roll out.
To Rand and the Community,
Am I right in saying that LinkedIn has been a real struggle to record stats from? Do you think you have nailed this now then?
Nice test - I hope it works out well and I hope it gets rolled out for everybody ASAP.
Thank you.
Hi irldonalb! Yes, LinkedIn is a bit of a struggle. We haven't started tackling it just yet, and we understand there will be some limitations. There are definately new and interesting challenges each time we try to pull data from another application, especially a social one with lots of data to store. Its something we're thinking about a lot and working hard on. Thanks!