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The Data LinkedIn Follower Stats Gives You

All of the charts bear a resemblance to those in Google Analytics and some provide month-by-month statistics. Want to know how many new followers your company acquired in September 2011 or how your number of followers has changed over the past year? It’s all there.

Overall, the LinkedIn Follower Statistics section is yet another way for companies to monitor how successfully they’re engaging with people through social media. Of course, this shouldn’t be the only monitoring tool you use, but LinkedIn’s colorful charts provide high-level, easy-to-digest data to supplement your other measurement efforts.

Kristen Watson Perko

Kristen Watson Perko is a Digital Marketing Manager at Direct Online Marketing.

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According to Google, being able to track user interactions allows you to identify valuable networks and content, ultimately providing additional insight for helping you reach goals or increase conversions.

The Social section shows traffic from the major social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as from blog and social bookmarking sites. Here is a short overview of what each section offers:

Sources

Identify networks and communities where people engage with your content and view basic metrics, like Average Visit Duration or Pages/Visit. This section allows you to see what content is performing well across each individual network.

Pages

The Pages section provides additional engagement metrics for individual URLs. Once you click on a URL, you’ll be able to see which networks referred the most traffic to that page.

Conversions

Measure the success and impact of your social campaigns by aligning them with your on-site goals and conversions (or ecommerce transactions, if you’re into that). From this section, you can identify which networks provide the highest ROI or monetary value. Of course, you’ll need to define goals and goal values to see conversion data.

Social Plugins

The Social Plugin report shows you how many people shared your content through social actions. You know those little buttons on your site that let people instantly share anything and everything? You can view that data in this section, but you’ll have to do some preliminary setup to track non-Google+ actions, obviously.

Social Visitors Flow:

The Social Visitors Flow section is especially handy when you’re tired of all those numbers. If you’re familiar with the Visitors Flow feature in the Audience section of Analytics, this is essentially the same tool for social. You can easily see the paths your visitors took through your site from specific social networks. The flowchart also clearly shows dropoff points.

The Verdict

Social analytics is a great way to monitor your social media impact, discover valuable social networks, and identify shareable content. If you’re new to Social analytics, I really recommend checking it out in-depth. If you’re an Analytics whiz and have been using Social since its release in late March, read on, as they added a few changes this week.

New Feature: The Backlinks Report in Google Social Analytics

According to Google, they monitor the web for sites linking to your published content. Once they find those links, they provide all the important data right in Social analytics. This data includes backlink URLs, post titles, dates, and sometimes even a particular user.

To get to this feature, you’ll need to navigate to the Pages section.

Select a specific URL, and then click on the Activity Stream tab.

Scroll down, and below the chart, you’ll find the blink-and-miss-it Events section, which is where your links are documented.

This article provides some additional screenshots and analysis. Overall, the Google Analytics backlinks report is a simple, easy-to-read list, even if you don’t know a lot of link logistics. For seasoned link builders and SEO specialists, it’s not necessarily Webmaster Tools, but it is updated much more quickly and is at least worth exploring.

The Found Video Recap

Kristen Watson Perko

Kristen Watson Perko is a Digital Marketing Manager at Direct Online Marketing.

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For Customers & Fans:

The LinkedIn Follow Company button is a great way to interact with some of your favorite companies. You’ll easily be able to see any news or updates from companies from your own homepage, so it’s more like twitter or facebook in concept. Check out the LinkedIn blog for more great tips on how to find and follow companies with LinkedIn’s new button feature.

For Companies:

According to LinkedIn, adding a Follow Company button to your website or any digital marketing material will make it easier for potential customers, prospects, and fans to follow your LinkedIn Company Page. Once people click on your Follow Company button, they’ll automatically follow your company if they’re logged in to LinkedIn (if not, they’ll be prompted for their information).

So…go get your own personalized LinkedIn Follow Company button. Visit the LinkedIn Developers page. Fill out the short form with your company name and choose whether you want to display your follower count and the button, or just the button. Click Get Code and a snippet of code will be generated, which you can then add to your website.

If you’ve been using the LinkedIn Follow Company button as either an individual or a company, feel free to let us know what you think!

Kristen Watson Perko

Kristen Watson Perko is a Digital Marketing Manager at Direct Online Marketing.

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Engage Your Audience with Company Status Updates Hi Justin, LinkedIn is excited to announce a powerful new feature for Company Pages—”Status Updates“. What can you do with Status Updates? Post updates directly from your company overview page. Share company announcements, product releases, promotions, and other news. Engage directly with your followers and possibly their entire network. Optimize the conversation by seeing which updates are most engaging. Here are a couple of companies using Status Updates to engage easily with their followers and prospective customers: 3Cinteractive, Rackspace Hosting. Go to your Company Page Try it today! The LinkedIn Company Pages Team Note: Updates can only be made by company “Administrators” when the Company Page is set to “Designated Admins Only”. If you are not an “Administrator”, please request access from the relevant person at your company.

Well, maybe yours wasn’t addressed to “Justin.”

Sounds great, right?  It is.  So you head on over to your company page and…there’s no frickin’ place to add updates or any instructions on how to do so.  This may  not be true for all of you, but I’m guessing it will for many, so I’ve put this post together to save some frustration.

How to Be Able to Add LinkedIn Company Status Updates

If you’re not seeing the status update box, you’ll need to click on the Admin Tools button in the upper right, then drop down to the Edit link.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll get into the section where you can change logos, edit your profile, etc.  if you haven’t already designated a company administrator, you’ll see this message displayed pretty prominently:

I guess they set it up this way as an extra safeguard, but if I set up my company profile, shouldn’t I be opted in to having admin rights already?  The select feature is also kind of infuriating as when you start typing in your (or others’) names, they actually give you more people to choose from, instead of narrowing down to fewer based on the actual name you’re typing.

Regardless, once you’ve gotten into the profile edit section, it’s all pretty clear how to set up and start using LinkedIn company updates.  You’d think LinkedIn would tell you that somewhere, like say on the video they set up to explain how to use updates.

They kind of do on their FAQ page (and mention you need to be an admin at the bottom of the email, but without instructions on how to do so), but it’s yet another example of LinkedIn offering some great tools – albeit ones that should have been available long ago – that it doesn’t promote very effectively.

But now that you know it’s there and how to get it going, it should be a nice tool.  Have at it!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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Social Media Week

I customize virtually all presentations for the audience and always update older material with recent changes in the online marketing world, but here’s one that will be totally new that I’m really looking forward to.  Online Marketing Connect is hosting its Social Media Week this week and you can register for free for the entire week’s worth of presentations from a good looking group of speakers.  And by “good looking,” I mean in terms of their organizations and material.  I do not know what most of them look like, but I’m sure they’re all Greek gods and goddesses.

My presentation is more intermediate-level and will focus on recent changes in the local sphere and its effects on reputation management and, ultimately, profitability.  I hope you’ll join me this Thursday at 5PM Eastern for Brave New Local / Social World: Recent Changes to Local & Review Sites and their Effect on Online Reputation Management.

Association of Information Technology Professionals

On Wednesday, May 11, I’ll be sitting on a 2-person panel with fellow blogger and all-around smart guy Russell Dunkin for the Greater Wheeling Chapter of AITP.  We’ll discuss blogging and social media as often times organizations put these things in the laps of the IT departments.  Even when it’s not their core responsibility, developers are often tasked with setting everything up, integrating various platforms, and maintaining the technical aspects.

West Virginia High Tech Consortium Foundation

The next morning I head down to attend the Generation West Virginia Young Leaders Conference.  On the way, I’ll stop in Fairmont, WV to present an intro to social media benefits and pitfalls entitled Can Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Local Review Sites Help Your Organization?

Update with specifics: Attendees of this Do Biz U presentation – who include WVHTC Foundation Affiliate Members, the Marion Regional Development Corporation, and Create Marion – will be able to ask questions about their organizations to learn specifically if and how social media can help them.  As much as we marketers deal with social media, it’s still daunting to many businesses who want to ensure they’re not doing themselves more harm than good before jumping in.

Click here for more details or to register to attend this event at the Robert H. Mollohan Research Center in Fairmont.

Facebook Deals Getting a Push

When I logged into the Direct Online Marketing™ facebook page today, I noticed a big notice at the top for facebook Deals.  Nothing new here – facebook often uses this space for announcements and facebook Deals were announced back in November.  Here it is:

Now, this isn’t showing up to admins on all pages by any stretch, but I find the timing extremely interesting.  Google announced on Tax Day that it was discontinuing Tags, which was their product most directly comparable to facebook Deals.  Now just barely a week later, facebook is pushing its Deals.

So What the Heck are Facebook Deals

If you’ve not heard of Deals, they’re a pretty interesting concept.  You can make up offers to appear in your news feed that work either for a particular person or multiple persons,  i.e. “Check in here with three of your friends, show the phone to the bartender and get a half-priced margarita.”

(For now) there’s not cost to facebook Deals, so if you have a local physical presence and coupons or incentives work with your sales model, give them a shot.  It’s a super fast and easy process – just click to edit your page and you’ll see a link for “Deals” all the way at the bottom of your left-hand menu.  Just be aware: once you start your Deal and it gets approved, you can’t change it any way, or add a second one to run at the same time.  Although, you can stop the deal from running at any time.

To learn more, visit the facebook deals home page.  Yes, yes, it says it’s only available in Hotlanta, Austin, Big D, San Diego and San Fran, but that’s just old.  Why update the main home page where people can learn more when you’re promoting it to facebook owners?  That would just be silly.  Actually, just skip that link above and visit a subpage where it doesn’t have misinformation.

If you like whitepapers, here’s their pdf.  Or if you like short videos, try this (puff), this (for iphone – describes different types), and this (walks you through adding them).

Happy Dealing!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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