Part of my job at WebFuel is to measure the success of our various Social Media initiatives. That being said, I must admit that it is struggle inasmuch as things are moving fast & furiously out there in the Social Media landscape.
Our Social Media Strategist Jason focuses in on Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn. The new player on the block is Google+ (Google Plus). Jason wrote an interesting post on Google’s newest child just last week. Google+ offers the possibility of being a game changer. Why you ask? Simply because it will have the ability to be deeply integrated into Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools. Probably more than any of its competitors will ever be.
I implemented Google+ buttons on our website last week (and StumbleUpon). At first I was undecided on whether to do it or not.
Probably because Google has only recently rolled out Google+ to Google.ca. So far interaction has been minimal as compared to the likes of Twitter & Facebook. I am hoping that this will change as more people sign up for and use Google+.
Note: Every indexed page of your website should now have a Google+ button beside it. Have a look.
A really cool thing about Google+ is that a web property owner can receive instant feedback on any page of their website that has been crawled by Google.
This is truly amazing as Twitter et al will never be able to do this as they do not have their very own Search Engine. Rather they depend heavily on the likes of Google (okay Bing, Yahoo, etc…) for visibility.
Back to Analytics. As it stands now, one can track user interaction with one’s Social Media profiles via Google Analytics’ Campaign Tracking tools. Very nifty. But a bit time consuming to implement.
Note: At WebFuel, we track every one of our Social Media profiles and associated interactions via Google Analytics.
Google+ promise more – much more. As of this writing, data on Google+ interaction with one’s web property can be viewed in Google Webmaster Tools.
And… Google Analytics! This is just the tip of the iceberg. Google is also adding some cool tools to measure Social Engagement across all of your Social Media properties. The “Social Engagement” reports allow you to see how people shared content on your site via social actions. Examples of social actions on your site that can be tracked include Google +1 button clicks, Facebook “Like” and “Send” interactions, and Del.icio.us bookmarks. You can compare the number of Facebook Like’s versus Facebook Send’s on your site, or compare the total number of Facebook interactions with the total number of Twitter interactions. And on and on.
All this to say that Social Media is hot. Very hot. Google is sinking big bucks into the Google Plus play. I like it. I hope others do as well as a great tool is only as good as the volume of people who use it.
Have you implemented Google+ on your website? Are you measuring your successes?