3 Tools for Measuring the Virality of Your Content

Several studies have shown that people trust the link and site recommendation they receive from their friends or experts in the field. To capitalize on this opportunity websites have long used features like “Recommend to a Friend” or “Email this” kind of functionality. Recently we have seen a rise in usage of tools/widgets that make it easy for the visitors to share links via email and social media.

Measuring Virality
Many of the tools/widget that allow you to add easy sharing now also have built in analytics to help you track things such as which content is getting shared, how many people like to share etc, what methods do they use to share etc.

3 tools that you should look into are:

• ShareThis
• AddThis
• Tynt

Tool Comparison

ShareThis and AddThis

ShareThis and AddThis are very similar in functionality with some minor differences but they look more like each other.

Both this widgets have very similar reporting and tell you

• How many links were shared
• How many people shared them
• What content was shared
• Number of clicks back to you site from those shares
• Sharer’s interest
• Geo locations of the sharers

AddThis and ShareThis only capture the information if a user uses the widget provided by these companies. However, these widgets won’t’ track the content shared by old fashioned copy and paste of either the URL or the actual content of the page. This is where Tynt comes into picture.

Tynt

Unlike AddThis and ShareThis Tyne does not have any share widget. Instead it works by automatically appending a unique hash value (a number folder by #) to each URL and the copied content. It uses that hash value (sort of like unique cookie) to determine metrics such as how many times the links/content was copied from your site, the number of visits it brought back and various other metrics.

Most of the reporting is very similar to AddThis and ShareThis widgets. Here is a list of some of the data that Tynt reports on:

• How many times your content was shared
• How many visitors you got back from those shares
• What content was shared and how much
• It even tells you how your sharing compares to others
• Geo locations of the sharers and clickers

However, There is one report that only Tynt provides and that is the keyword report. It shows you

1. Inbound keywords - keywords that visitors searched to get to your site (AddThis has a different variation of keyword report)
2. Outbound keyword - the keywords that visitors found on your sites but left your site to find out more about them. This is a really cool report because it tells me what else I can write more about on my site so that my visitors don’t have to leave the site to find out more about them. I will be using that report to add more content to my blog/site.

I will cover some more details on these tools and how we use them for our clients in future but for now I suggest you look at these tools and let me know what you like or don’t like about them.

Do you know of or use any other service? Send me the details.

Note: In addition to above three there is “Facebook Like” button too.