Another month, another update. Following our latest changes, we keep pushing our social media analytics and content performance analytics even further and changed the structure of our more in-depth analysis pages.

As we add more functionalities to our product, we always look back and try to understand if the User Experience is still simple and intuitive. Some of our previous and current changes reflect that attitude and this update is no exception.

After reshaping our social analytics dashboard, we wanted to give a fresh look and provide better data to Insights and Enterprise users. As such, we’ve transformed our previous Items page into the new Top Stories page, to make the experience easier to navigate.

Have a look at our new Top Stories page (formerly know as Items):

The Top Stories page houses all data about specific pages (or URLs) of your website: how many visitors, shares, referrals (visitors arriving through shares), sharing rate and virality score (the old k-factor metric).

For those that never tried the Insights or Enterprise plans before, here’s the definition of the last two terms:

• • Sharing Rate: what percentage of visitors are sharing (if 10 out of 100 visitors share the content, the sharing rate is 10%);

• Virality Score: indicates how many extra visitors the shares are attracting, which is a good indicator that your promotion efforts are reaching the right people (e.g. influencers);

If you want to try this new feature but don’t have the Insights plan, send an email to support@getsocial.io and we’ll provide you with a free trial so you can have a taste of the new stuff.

How to you improve your content performance

I’ll give a quick example of how actionable this data is.

In the image above, there are two blog posts, being the first an article (about 1-month-old) that we shared in our June’s newsletter, and the second an older case study. While the case study has a much higher share rate, it’s attracting much less referral traffic. This means that the people that are sharing or the shares themselves aren’t very persuasive or influential. It can also mean that it’s old news and there isn’t much interest in this anymore.

On the other hand, the most recent article (the first one) is not being shared too much. However, every time a share is made, it gets a lot more visitors (or referral traffic). This can be a great post to promote, but let us try to understand why visitors are less eager to share this, as this greatly influences our post’s reach.

Shares by Channel

As we can see, besides Private Messaging, most shares were made on Facebook. Let’s see how Facebook shares look like.

Share description: “Want to know the best way to track Dark Social shares? We have one of the simplest, most inexpensive solutions on the market (from 7$/month) to help you.”

Ups! I think I’ve found the problem: the description might be a bit too much sales-oriented, making visitors uncomfortable with sharing this. The post was also released on a Friday, which is usually a slow day, there might be other factors that I overlooked.

Paying attention to these details and fine-tuning your content performance is mandatory when you want to pay for promotion on social networks. Otherwise, you’ll pay a lot more for much less effect!

New Facebook Messenger Button for Mobile Bar

As weird as this may sound, Facebook didn’t officially support share buttons for Facebook Messenger… on mobile. You could have them on desktop, but it was unavailable on mobile phones.

It didn’t make much sense, but it’s finally available on our Mobile Share bar, which should be a great addition, especially because the Mobile Bar is our best performing share tool.