Vitis PR agency

Tracking social media metrics for web pages

You can track social metrics (the number of likes, shares, tweets etc.) for your web pages by looking at the individual services (e.g. Facebook for example offers 'insights'). If you know how, you can also use snippets of javascript in your pages and get all that info in Google Analytics. But wouldn't it be so much easier if you could just consolidate all that social media monitoring information in one place, in one tool without having to mess with javascript and the like? Yes? Well, you can...

Armed with just some Google Docs and a bit of API documentation for the services you're interested in you can track those metrics quite easily. By importing counts of tweets etc. into a Google Docs spreadsheet you can get an instant view of how much buzz there is around your pages. If you just want to go ahead and use the tool, here it is.

The tool is simply a spreadsheet that uses the importdata function to pull data about each url from Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook via API calls. The API calls used are available in the top row of the sheet, but here they are, for reference:

Facebook monitoring: http://graph.facebook.com/?id= 

Linkedin monitoring: http://www.linkedin.com/cws/share-count?url=  

Twitter monitoring: http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=

You can see the sort of thing these API calls return if you just type one into a browser, e.g. http://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://www.vitispr.com  returns this data:

{
   "id": "http://www.vitispr.com",
   "shares": 1
}

The rest of the functions in the spreadsheet simply pull out the metric (shares in this case) and put the value into the appropriate column for the url being checked.

To use the tracker simply:

1. Make your own copy of the spreadsheet (from the File menu) - you can grab the spreadsheet from http://bit.ly/simple-social-metrics
2. Enter the urls you want tracked in  the green boxes
3. Sit back and watch the magic happen!

Note, if you don't see the numbers you expect for facebook, check whether you've added/missed a trailing slash from the url.

Limitations and enhancements: this social media mention tracker is only useful if you've got a limited number of urls that you want to track - each Google spreadsheet is limited to 50 import functions so (tracking 3 social networks). You can get around this limitation by copying the spreadsheet and having multiple tracking sheets for different sets of web pages. An alternative is to use functions to call the social network APIs, avoiding the 50 import function limit - if that would be useful let me know in the comments and I'll see if I can put something together that tracks many more URLs.