Marketing Pilgrim

The biggest problem with social media marketing is that it’s hard to measure your results. You throw everything you have at Twitter and Facebook and mostly you just hope to see an upswing in traffic.

To alleviate this problem, ShareThis, the social media sharing widget, is adding an analytic component that will not only measure sharing but will also monitor the Social Reach. Social Reach looks not only at the outbound sharing but it follows through to see if the person who gets the link clicks on it, thus completing the circle of [blog] life.

According to ShareThis’ website, the new analytics will also deliver numbers related to the type of audience that is sharing your links and it will compare your blog to others in the category to see if you’re doing better or worse than your competition.

To show the impact of their new tool, ShareThis has provided an infograph made from information collected across the 850,000 publishers in their system.

What’s interesting to note here is that Twitter isn’t very effective when it comes to social reach. Only 8% of people are clicking on what they’re sent, while the return on both email and Facebook are nearly equal. Many people have been warning marketers not to give up on email and this graphic shows why.

The information I’m interested in seeing is how these numbers change when you drill down into the various categories. Do entertainment tweets get clicked on more often than business tweets, for example? These are the numbers you need to have in order to make the most of your social media marketing campaign.

Right now, ShareThis is beta testing the new reports so not everyone has them. If you’re on WordPress, though, you should go in an upgrade your ShareThis widget. They have clean, new buttons that are a huge improvement over the old design.

ShareThis says they expect to fully roll out the new reports within the next few weeks.