I use the Social Metrics Plugin for WordPress, to monitor the “social life” of my posts. This plugin is exceptional good, in presenting you how well your articles have traveled down the funnel of social media and what reception they had. This information is important to me because it shows me the articles have gone well against the articles have not traveled beyond my site! This knowledge helps me to discern the pattern working or not and assist me to build better posts!
About Platforms
A platform is a tool for you to broadcast your message(s) to the world. And it is important for anyone, who wants to say some things to the world and get some answers about the validity of his/hers sayings!
This is the reason why you have to know who your message is reached to and how it is received!
Do you remember the old game? You toss away a pebble in the lake and count the ripples done, or the how much times the pebble jumps up! But the main thing is how many ripples would you pebble created and how far the ripples have gone.
It is the exact same thing with messages. Usually, a message today is like a “message in the bottle“!!! You do not know who is going to pick it up!
It is a strange feeling, and it is even more beautiful, the fact that actually someone picks up your message and relay it to other third parties. And sometimes, he/she send a response, too, or communicate with you with questions or (better yet!) comments!
There is always a response. Either in a direct or in an indirect way! Directly when someone decided to communicate with you directly or comment your post, and indirect when someone decides to distribute your content to someone else. If, as a blogger, you write well and make constant content, of high value and duality then the same mechanism would permit you to develop an active community around your ideas!
This is blogging, actually, and many times, you need to know where your message goes. For this type of work, I usually rely on the Social Metrics Plugin for WordPress.
The Social Metrics Plugin for WordPress
As been described by its developer “Social Metrics is a Social Media Analytics tool you can use to track your WordPress blog performance on popular social networking websites and services” (Social Metrics).
Some of the strong points of this WordPress plugin include the ability to:
- monitor how the people shared your posts across different social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google +, StumbleUpon, Digg and LinkedIn),
- count the number of shares in these networks,
- define your best-shared posts and pages in the social networks,
- measure the social influence of your posts,
- help you define the best (most suitable) social networks for your content.
In total, Social Metrics Plugin for WordPress in conjunction with its other features provides you valuable information about the social media performance of your content, and it can help you organize and  “strategize” better your social media marketing efforts!
The Social Life Of Your Posts – How I Use Social Metrics
I use Social Metrics plugin for exactly the same reasons and for bringing the same results. For me, it is important how far an article or post of mine have gone in the social networks, as well as the how it is received!
That’s why, I use the social metrics plug-in, mainly, for:
- Check the popularity of a post in the social media,
- Times an article/post has been propagated (an indirect index for its usefulness!),
- By what networks (in order to determine what social media or rather which social communities are more like to receive my messages well!),
- How it received and treated (it has been propagated, or not, by how many people, etc)
Social Metrics is a freemium plugin. You can download it from the WordPress site and you can see the results for yourself!
