3 Quick and Easy Ways to Check the Main Social Metrics

Most SEOs have a veritable plethora of tools they use day in and day out for the wide variety of tasks they usually need to concern themselves with. We have tools for scraping SERPs, crawling sites, analysing log files, checking HTTP headers, and about 1 million other things.

However, even with all these tools at our disposal I still get asked often about simple ways to check the main social metrics for a page. I don’t want to start a debate on what the ‘main social metrics’ actually are; we are just going to go right ahead and assume that if you know the number of Tweets, Likes and +1s then you can usually draw your conclusions from that.

I’ve broken the need for quick checks of these data down into 3 categories:

• An instant check of the metrics for the current page.
• A quick check of a short list of URLs which you can do via n easy accessible tool.
• Check a longer list of URLs which requires more robustness.

Continuing my recent trend of throwing together tools for the SEO community to use I’ve put together 3 tools to help out in these instances. If you are doing serious en masse data collection then you need a more robust solution, and probably already have one; here I’m aiming at filling some of the gaps on the spot check scenarios that SEOs come across in their day to day activities.

Social Metrics for Current Page – Chrome Extension

Ok, Firefox fans, I’m sorry but this solution is built only for Chrome, which an increasing majority of SEOs are turning too and happens to be what I use.

I’ve created a simple Chrome Extension that shows the share boxes for whatever page you happen to be on.

This is the first version (and my first attempt at a Chrome Extension) so it needs some polish, but for its purpose it works really well. Simply install the Chrome Extension then click on the icon to see the metrics for the current page.

Install: Simple Social Metrics Chrome Extension

It isn’t ideal for actually sharing on Facebook or Google+, but works well for Twitter. I might update the extension for that, but beyond that I want to keep it relatively simple.

Social Metrics for Small List of URLs – Web Tool

This is a tool I created for the cases where you have a short list of URLs and you want to quickly compare and contrast how widely they were shared on the different social platforms. It’s pretty simple, you go to the tool and paste in a few URLs and then, if everything went well, you see the results:

You can reorder by any of the header columns, and download the results as a CSV file for playing with should you wish. You can give it a try here:

Web Tool: Simple Bulk Social Metrics

I will warn that it is likely that this tool might sometimes break; it doesn’t use a proxy and so everyone who uses it means it hits the social networks’ APIs and my server may sometimes get blocked. In these cases you’ll have to use the tool below for more robustly checking lists of URLs.

I often use Google Docs for checking social metrics, but this I find to be quicker and simpler when I have a short list of URLs I want to take a real quick look at.

Social Metrics for Larger List of URLs – Google Docs Tool

This is the most robust and flexible of the 3 tools, but requires you to be logged in to a Google account to use, and isn’t as quick fire to deploy for small lists of URLs. However when you have a larger list of URLs and/or want to do other manipulation of the data then this is the tool you need.

I’ll assume you have basic Google Docs knowledge. All you need to do (after you’ve made a copy of the sheet so you can edit it) is put in the list of URLs in the A column and the tool will start pulling in the data immediately. You should see something like this:

This tool actually breaks the Facebook data down a little more to give you a heightened level of detail. You can access the sheet here and will need to select “Make a copy” from the File menu:

GDocs Tool: Bulk Social Metrics

You will find the scripts in the script editor if you wish to edit them or use them in another sheet.

Wrap Up

Hopefully this post will help provide people with a bit of choice in how they can access this data, in what formats, and how quickly. Have fun with them!

Tom Anthony is an SEO with a background as a web developer and as an Artificial Intelligence researcher (still working 1 day a week on his PhD thesis!). He gets a little over excited about APIs and Christmas Dinner. He also writes sporadically on his own site.

Follow @TomAnthonySEO

Tom Anthony