As you know two weeks ago, we launched our newest site List25. Our entire marketing strategy relies on social media. Each post on the site has viral potential, but we needed one place to see which social networks are performing the best for us. One page that will simply show us every post’s social metrics side by side. You can create fancy custom reports in Google Analytics, but we did not want to over-complicate things. Luckily, there is a plugin that does all of this from the WordPress dashboard. In this article, we will show you how to track social metrics for each post in your WordPress dashboard. This will allow you to see how your blog is doing across the leading social networking sites, but it will also allow you to get a better sense of what your users like. You can use these metrics to create even better content on your site.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin called Social Metrics. Upon installation, a new menu tab will be added right below the Dashboard called Social Metrics.
This is where you can see how well each of your posts are doing on popular social metric sites. Instead of going to each post individually, this gives you an idea. For example one of our posts on List25 got 64,000 views from Stumbleupon. Another one got 24,000 views. This allows us to better cater our future articles.
Now because List25 is a new site, its easier to see all the popular articles. On a site that has a lot of articles like WPBeginner, we needed a place to sort all articles at once and have a faster loading time. We went ahead and got the PRO Version of Social Metrics.
The Pro version allows us to get real-time data from social media networks. We can track posts, pages, or any other custom post type we want to. Most importantly, it allows us to sort by the most popular in each social network. Last but certainly not least, it allows us to export our data to a spreadsheet and run better analysis.
Currently the plugin adds outdated social networks like Buzz which we can get rid of. For WPBeginner, we are not using Digg or Buzz. So we cleared up the clutter and organized it how we wanted by getting rid of those two social networks.
Normally the PRO version costs $69.90, but if you use the coupon wpbeginner30 then you can get $30 off the product.
There is a 30-day money back guarantee. Which is the reason why we tried the PRO version in the first place. So you can take our word for it, or try it yourself. If you don’t like it, you can get your money back.
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Doesn’t this plugin put a huge strain on the server by constantly querying the values from all the social networks?
@JeanPaulH yes, slows my site a great deal. I eventually uninstalled it.
@justex07 Thank you. I was afraid it’d do that. Constantly querying this kind of data doesn’t come cheap.
Hoping some kind of smart caching is going to be incorporated, since I like the plugin’s idea. But it has to be *really* smart will it win my server’s heart…
@JeanPaulH@justex07 We are running it both on WPBeginner and List25, and it hasn’t slowed our site down. The plugin has no baring on the front-end of your site. It only works on the backend (only when you actually load the Social Metrics Page)
@wpbeginner@JeanPaulH@justex07 I would recommend you test drive the latest version of Social Metrics Pro. There have been massive improvements in speed and performance – http://www.riyaz.net/social-metrics-pro/
I never heard of Social Metrics, so I’ll give it a try. Thanks for the links. I’ll check out List25 soon. Best wishes for your success with it.
Great!
Almost immediately I wanted to disable social networks I wouldn’t need to check… anyway, free version is awesome as it is.
Thanks for the tip!
I can’t tell if buying the Pro version gets you lifetime updates and if you can use it on multiple sites. Any idea?
imeson, the current version gets you lifetime updates and can be used on multiple sites. Pls let me know if you need more help.
I am already using the free version of this plugin and I have to agree it is quite handy.