8 Reasons to Play with Backtype

Good morning, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Last week I found an interesting website called Backtype.  This site lets you measure your brand’s social impact and engagement  - it tells you when and how often your website content is shared on social networks such as Twitter, digg, reddit etc.

Below is the engagement results for this website, a total of 765 tweets over all time and you can see there was a BIG spike on 30th May when I released the 30 LinkedIn Tips (thanks tweeters ).  I saw this and thought boo, you guys don’t share that much, but if I average it out over all blog posts that is roughly 2.1 tweets per post, so not that bad really (this Rabbit is rather a high achiever!).  More importantly what I liked seeing from this is who is sharing the content, as I don’t see that normally, and it gives me a reason to go and chat to those people.

You can look up your domain and anyone else’s, the bigger sites have more information, here is Mashable.  As you can see Mashable has A LOT more information in the search results than this little site, probably due to the amount of content that is shared.  You can see the popular latest pages that were shared, who the biggest influencer’s are and the different sites that the content is shared on.

Over half a million comments on Mashable is definitely something to aspire to… one day

Finally with Backtype you can also compare two sites, I tried to find an example for this, but I couldn’t find two similar sites where one site didn’t have a flat line because it was so small in terms of engagement vs. the other!

Why is Backtype good to play with?

1. It gives you a really good idea as to who the top influencer’s are for a site, and potentially if you engaged with them and built a relationship imagine if they shared your content!
2. You can see which articles are most popular at that time without having to look at each one and see how many times each is retweeted
3. Find a site that you see as  a competitor to yours then compare them to see how you are tracking against them
4. Use this as a way to measure your social media success, the total number of shares an article gets
5. Look at who has shared the articles and contact them directly to say “thanks” and build a relationship with them
6. You can set up alerts similar to Google and Socialmention for FREE.  Then you will get notified of shares in real time.
7. Look at bigger sites to see which articles are popular and then write on a similar topic
8. You can see which networks people are sharing that content on, which you could use to narrow down the number of share buttons you have on your site, or as a way to know where to go to interact with people interested in those topics.

Have any of you tried Backtype?  I’ve just signed up for a free 30 day trial of pro version which gives you more data.  I will keep you posted once it updates.  Love to hear from anyone who has used it and how it has benefited your social media or if you think it sucks!  Tell me below…..