What Tools Can I Use to Track Social Media? Social Media Marketing in PA

Social media is becoming increasingly important for Search Engine Optimization and other online marketing strategies.  Recent data revealed the correlation between Facebook shares and search engine rankings.  This blog post is all about Social Media Marketing in PA--Pennsylvania companies looking to expand upon, develop, or track and measure their social media strategies effectiveness will find the following information helpful. 

There are several different ways of tracking social media strategies, from the easy and basic stuff to more complicated methods.  There are many, many 3rd party tools that have been developed for social media monitoring, tracking, and reporting.  If you’re looking to use a 3rd party tool for your social media marketing in PA, we can recommend several of the best options. 

Topsy: A great twitter tracking service.  Their search functionality is fantastic (it’s very easy to use) and Topsy offers great data.  You’re able to search popular hash tags and browse twitter results, including a summary of shared links.  It’s also a great way to analyze your competitors Twitter presence.

Post Rank: Another neat 3rd party service for tracking pages and providing engagement metrics for your content.  You have the option of submitting pages manually or via a RSS feed.  Post Rank can also hook up to Google Analytics and provide actual stats for visitor counts.  If you’re interested in monitoring your social media marketing campaign, you can get started with Post Rank for free—or sign up for their $15 a month package.  Overall, an excellent tool for tracking your own content, although not so much for competitor sites. 

SharedCount: SharedCount is a fantastic app that provides a quick and simple social media stat lookup for any URL you choose.  If you’d like to benchmark your own Facebook, Digg, Google Buzz, Twitter, and StumbleUpon data, SharedCount can provide a social media footprint for any URL you choose. 

Retrieving Social Data Via APIs:  Social Media Marketing in PA

Aside from 3rd party tools and services, there are several DIY solutions.  An API is a method for fetching data from a remote resource in an efficient way.  It’s easy to use APIs to collect the social media statistics you’d like to include in a report.  For instance, consider the Facebook Graph API.  You can do this by visiting the following URL:  Graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://www.yoursite.com where you’ll be able to see “shares”: 324 or the number of times your page was recently shared. 

Other free APIs that let you gather information about a website’s social presence:

Facebook:  Graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://www.yoursite.com
Twitter:   Urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.yoursite.com
Linkedin: Linkedin.com/cws/share-count?url=http://www.yoursite.com
StumbleUpon: Stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url=http://www.yoursite.com
Delicious:  Feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/urlinfo/data?url=http://www.yoursite.com
Google Buzz: Googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/count?alt=json&url=http://www.yoursite.com
Reddit: Reddit.com/api/info.json?url=http://www.yoursite.com

We recommend using APIs as opposed to collecting data from HTML pages. Should you wish to learn more about social media marketing in PA or social media tracking tools, consult with a social media marketing expert.

ArticleSource: ArticlesAlley.com