PostRank in the Real World: Community Stories – Webinar Followup

Thank you to everyone who participated in our webinar this week. In particular, I would like to thank our guests:

It was an absolute pleasure to have these individuals talk about their experience with blogging and PostRank Analytics. In my opinion, their thoughts and insights made this our best one yet! If you missed it live, you can watch a recording of the webinar here:

PostRank in the Real World: Community Stories from PostRank Inc. on Vimeo.

Q: What other social media measurement tools for the panelists use in addition to PostRank and how do they integrate them?

A:

From Aaron – Klout – I find that the tool is useful for understanding your authority on Twitter.From  Angie - Klout – I find that PostRank works better for my needs time-wise.From Gini -Google Analytics – I use Google Analytics and PostRank together.

Q: What are a couple of the main criteria you use when deciding if blogging is a good strategy for their business?

A:

From Gini – If the client is looking for things like thought leadership for an individual, credibility for an organization but they have a strong spokesperson or personality that can manage the process or if they are looking for things like speaking engagements or bi-line articles, things like that, that is when we would typically recommend blogging. It depends, some clients want to blog but don’t have anything to talk about so we don’t recommend it.From Aaron – I agree with Gini. For a lot of clients its good for them. Sometimes they don’t have the time or the manpower. If the resources and information are there than blogging can be an excellent tool for clients.

Q: Can you give an example of time when tracking engagement lead to developing good new relationships with clients, customers, partners, etc. or strengthened existing ones?

A:

From Angie – PostRank shows who the ‘big players’ are in your network. Once you take that information and start engaging with that person, that little share becomes a bigger share and they start promoting your work more. Sometimes its hard to see that depending how they tweet, but when I can go in ans see that this person is sharing a lot of work and they have a big network, that is something you can really begin to leverage.

Q: Which additional sources of engagement would the panelists suggest be included in the PostRank algorithm?

A: We currently collect data from over 20 different social networks and hubs. You can find a complete list of all our engagement sources here.

From Aaron – No suggestions. It has everything we need. Most of the things we track are social bookmarks like Digg and Reddit, but primarily Facebook and Twitter.From Angie – I love Stumbleupon, but I already know that PostRank is unable to get access to this data. Other than that, it has everything that I need.From Gini – We use Livefyre for our commenting system and even though it syncs to WordPress comments which PostRank tracks, for some reason there is a disconnect so PostRank is not currently tracking our comments, which wouldn’t be a big deal if I weren’t trying to beat a few people in the AdAge Power 150. I’m just slightly competitive. So we’re not getting credit on AdAge for our comments and we get 100-200 comments a day. I would love to see that, but I know it is something PostRank is working on. It is a big thing for us.

Q: Has PostRank shaped the channels that you use to promote blogs through?

A:

From Aaron – Yes absolutely. Before we would create a lot of blog content and spend a lot time sharing on every social site possible and then we realized that a lot of engagement comes from select sites. We started using those select sites to improve efficiency, just because of the engagement we receive from those sites. We still use a lot of the other social sites, but we don’t see as much value from them. That was something we were able to realize using PostRank.From Gini – Yes, this is exactly our experience. For one client, LinkedIn is huge for him and we didn’t realize that until we started looking at PostRank Analytics. One of the big things we started to push this client on was getting him involved in groups and discussions and things like that because we know from PostRank Analytics that a lot of his traffic is coming directly from LinkedIn.