The sweet part is that Google Analytics now allows you to conduct much of the same measurement and analytics that you’ve enjoyed through PostRank. We invite you to access the new Social reports within Google Analytics. If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account it’s free and easy to sign up. Learn more about the new Social reports in our blog post.

As of May 1st, PostRank.com, PostRank Analytics, Top Posts widgets, and Google Reader plugin, will be taken offline.

Regards,
The PostRank team

The new Google Analytics Social reports will help you identify the full value of socially referred traffic and see how the social channel contributes to your goals, conversions, and ecommerce transactions. Additionally, the new reports will also help you measure your visitors on-site engagement, where they came from, and even help you identify off-site conversations about your content.

What PostRank users need to know:

• A new set of Social reports being released in Google Analytics which will provide useful data to show the value of social for your business or website in an innovative way.
• Google Analytics is used by larger number of websites globally. If you already have a Google Analytics account these new social reports will be automatically be available to you.

If you’re not a Google Analytics user, we invite you to sign up now to get access to the new Social reports (which are available to all Google Analytics users). Learn more about the new Social reports in our blog post.

Important: Note that PostRank Analytics and PostRank.com “feed management” app will be sunset on May 1, 2012, so make sure you’re an active Google Analytics user now to ensure uninterrupted social insights.

Thanks,
The PostRank / Google Analytics Team

For full details please refer to our earlier post.

To make sure this is a smooth transition and to ensure that your site is not affected, we’re sharing the timelines below for the closing of the Top Posts widget and the Google Reader extension (for all browsers).

• The Top Posts widget and WordPress plugin installs will continue to work as usual until April 1st. At that time the Top Posts widgets and the PostRank APIs will be disabled. Please remove the Top Posts widget javascript code from your site before April 1st, and note that after this time the widget will not display any data.
• Similarly, the Google Reader extension will continue to operate until April 1st. If you are a current user, you can safely remove the browser extension any time before April 1st.

Finally, as of today you will no longer be able to install new Top Posts widgets or Google Reader extensions. This is for new installations only. As mentioned, existing installations will work until April 1st.

We hope you found these services valuable. If you have any questions about the retirement of these services please direct them to support@postrank.com.

From the seed of an idea in late 2006, to the launch of PostRank in mid 2007, and an incredible four years of continuous learning, iteration, and developing and launching new products—what an amazing experience it has been. And yet, the best is still yet to come. Today, we are excited to announce that PostRank has been acquired by Google!

We know that making sense of social engagement data is important for online businesses, which is why we have worked hard to monitor where and when content generates meaningful interactions across the web. Indeed, conversations online are an important signal for advertisers, publishers, developers and consumers—but today’s tools only skim the surface of what we think is possible.

We are extremely excited to join Google. We believe there is simply no better company on the web today that both understands the value of the engagement data we have been focusing on, and has the platform and reach to bring its benefits to the untold millions of daily, active Internet users. Stay tuned, we’ll be sure to share details on our progress in the coming months!

Of course, we wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for all the help, feedback, and support we’ve received from our community over the past four years—thank you all, you know who you are, and we truly couldn’t have done it without you!

Ilya & Carol

P.S. Our team will be moving to Google’s Mountain View offices in California. So, if you are nearby, come say hi; we are friendly Canucks!

Please send all press inquiries to press@google.com.

Pam is a Marketing Communications and Social Media Manager at Intronis Cloud Backup + Recovery in Boston, MA. Pam recently graduated from Suffolk with an MBA. She’s a freelance blogger, social media geek, and avid Red Sox Fan. While working for Holland-Mark, Pam was able to use PostRank Analytics to listen, analyze and keep in touch with what was happening with client’s online content.

“Online content is important because without content you have no value to offer the target market online. You can use social media, but without the content, social media cannot do as much for your brand.” said Pam as we discussed the importance of online content for the clients she worked with. “Content shows what a company does, the people behind the brand and give consumers what they want (or what they will want). As many say ‘content is king’.”

Like many PostRanker’s using our tools in an agency environment, Pam found that PostRank Analytics does a great job of demonstrating to clients what content is relevant, valuable and shared among audiences on the social web. When using PostRank with clients, Pam found that “it assisted in seeing whether the client’s content was relevant, as well as the content of the competition, bloggers in the sphere and others. It was great for curating content, as well as keeping track of what was being said online and analytics.” Specifically she said that “PostRank is great for assisting clients in starting out with their content hub, especially those who had not used social media in the past and needed to start fresh.”

I want to personally give a big shout out to Pam and thank her for taking some time out of her busy schedule to talk to me about her experience. The thoughts and insights she shared have help us here at PostRank learn more about how our tools are being put to use.

The Reports offer an at-a-glance overview of how your site’s content performed the previous day, and whether that’s better or worse than expected based on past performance.

There is also an engagement activity breakdown by social hub, giving you a view of your content’ “culture” and where your audience likes sharing best.

And there is the Activity Stream, giving you a snapshot of the specific fans, actions, and hubs on which your content is getting the most traction.

For the traditionalists, at the top of each report is a link to the old style if you’d like to do a comparison. And we’d love to hear your feedback. There is a link in the light blue-grey section near the bottom of the report as well where you can let us know what you think of the updated Reports, and your preferences so we can make them even better.

Thank you to everyone who participated in our webinar this week. In particular, I would like to thank our guests:

• Aaron Schoenberger – Founder and CEO of the Brainchild Group – @TheSchoenberger
• Angie Nelson – Virtual Assistant and Author on The Work at Home Wife – @thewahwife
• Gini Dietrich – Founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich Inc. and Author of Spin Sucks – @ginidietrich

It was an absolute pleasure to have these individuals talk about their experience with blogging and PostRank Analytics. In my opinion, their thoughts and insights made this our best one yet! If you missed it live, you can watch a recording of the webinar here:

PostRank in the Real World: Community Stories from PostRank Inc. on Vimeo.

Questions from the webinar

Q: What other social media measurement tools for the panelists use in addition to PostRank and how do they integrate them?

A:

• From Aaron – Klout – I find that the tool is useful for understanding your authority on Twitter.
• From  Angie - Klout – I find that PostRank works better for my needs time-wise.
• From Gini -Google Analytics – I use Google Analytics and PostRank together.

Q: What are a couple of the main criteria you use when deciding if blogging is a good strategy for their business?

A:

• From Gini – If the client is looking for things like thought leadership for an individual, credibility for an organization but they have a strong spokesperson or personality that can manage the process or if they are looking for things like speaking engagements or bi-line articles, things like that, that is when we would typically recommend blogging. It depends, some clients want to blog but don’t have anything to talk about so we don’t recommend it.
• From Aaron – I agree with Gini. For a lot of clients its good for them. Sometimes they don’t have the time or the manpower. If the resources and information are there than blogging can be an excellent tool for clients.

Q: Can you give an example of time when tracking engagement lead to developing good new relationships with clients, customers, partners, etc. or strengthened existing ones?

A:

• From Angie – PostRank shows who the ‘big players’ are in your network. Once you take that information and start engaging with that person, that little share becomes a bigger share and they start promoting your work more. Sometimes its hard to see that depending how they tweet, but when I can go in ans see that this person is sharing a lot of work and they have a big network, that is something you can really begin to leverage.

Q: Which additional sources of engagement would the panelists suggest be included in the PostRank algorithm?

A: We currently collect data from over 20 different social networks and hubs. You can find a complete list of all our engagement sources here.

• From Aaron – No suggestions. It has everything we need. Most of the things we track are social bookmarks like Digg and Reddit, but primarily Facebook and Twitter.
• From Angie – I love Stumbleupon, but I already know that PostRank is unable to get access to this data. Other than that, it has everything that I need.
• From Gini – We use Livefyre for our commenting system and even though it syncs to WordPress comments which PostRank tracks, for some reason there is a disconnect so PostRank is not currently tracking our comments, which wouldn’t be a big deal if I weren’t trying to beat a few people in the AdAge Power 150. I’m just slightly competitive. So we’re not getting credit on AdAge for our comments and we get 100-200 comments a day. I would love to see that, but I know it is something PostRank is working on. It is a big thing for us.

Q: Has PostRank shaped the channels that you use to promote blogs through?

A:

• From Aaron – Yes absolutely. Before we would create a lot of blog content and spend a lot time sharing on every social site possible and then we realized that a lot of engagement comes from select sites. We started using those select sites to improve efficiency, just because of the engagement we receive from those sites. We still use a lot of the other social sites, but we don’t see as much value from them. That was something we were able to realize using PostRank.
• From Gini – Yes, this is exactly our experience. For one client, LinkedIn is huge for him and we didn’t realize that until we started looking at PostRank Analytics. One of the big things we started to push this client on was getting him involved in groups and discussions and things like that because we know from PostRank Analytics that a lot of his traffic is coming directly from LinkedIn.

At PostRank, we’ve been incredibly fortunate over the years to receive a lot of feedback about our products and services. There have been many blog posts, tweets and emails from community members and we can’t thank each and every one of them enough for their support and insight. We think some of the stories they’ve shared with us are incredibly valuable and so, we’d like to share them with you.

We’ve been spending some serious time reaching out and connecting with our community members using analytics everyday to monitor the content that they and their clients publish online. We will be showcasing a few of these individuals in a 30 minute live webinar on May 11th, 2011 at 2pm EST. Our scheduled guests are:

• Gini Dietrich – Founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich Inc. and author of Spin Sucks
• Angie Nelson – Blogger and creator of The Work at Home Wife
• Aaron Schoenberger – Founder and CEO of The Brainchild Group

Join us as we learn a little about who are guests are, what they do and how they’re using PostRank Analytics. There will be a portion at the end of the webinar so you can ask some questions and get some answers from our insightful and experienced guests. Registration is now open.

Numbers, numbers, numbers. Every election brings a tidal wave of numbers for consumption and consideration. Major research firms regularly post polls on leader approval rating, voter intentions and other questions meant to gauge the thoughts and emotions of the electorate. In Canada, a country that spends more time online than any other nation, we responded to the evolving political campaign with tweets, comments and social bookmarks as we consumed and shared content online.

In this year’s election, PostRank began looking at social engagement with content originating from the major party websites a week after the campaign kick-off.  We shared that story in a blog post that featured an infographic illustrating the performance of content from party websites on the social web. We’ve updated that data and discovered that the Liberals and NDP continue to be leaders in utilizing their websites as content hubs that can effectively proliferate their messages across social networks. Both parties were able to create thousands of conversations in social media that included URL references to content on their site.

Of course, people discovered election stories, news and events from a variety of sources including: major news outlets, independent blogs and video. So we decided to broaden our search looking at stories and articles from these different sources online. This enabled the reconstruction of a timeline that plots out the development of the election using only data from social networks and hubs. We were able to find stories and events that generated major social engagement events and define the general trend of these interactions in order to make a non-trivial conclusion about the electorate’s behavior and its preferences in choosing election content online.

Analyzing this data revealed the following:

• The general trend shows that the number of social engagement events increased as the election day approached. Up and down spikes got smoother and the density of events grew.
• The overall character of the line is very relevant to the election’s development. All major events are reflected with spikes in the number of social engagement events a story or piece of news received.
• The highest point on the line marks the announcement of the elections. Canadians shared and commented on this news widely. The news was circulated actively abroad as well, in UK and Australia primarily.
• The lowest point, the end of April, was the Easter long weekend. Naturally the holiday distracted Canadians from election stories.
• Sharp drops in social engagement events with stories about the election happened on weekends. Canadians didn’t want to waste their time-off reading about election stories and events. However, weekend drops got smaller as the election day approached and so, people became more inclined to spend their private time sharing and commenting on news and stories about the election.
• Prominent spikes are located in the middle of the weekdays. On the one hand it is because this is normally when major news and events take place, on the other hand – it is also midweek when Canadians read their news in their workplaces, prompting them to share and comment on those stories in social media.

There is little correlation to be drawn here between the results we’ve come up with looking at social engagement with election content online and the results at the polls, let alone the ballot box. However, we have been able to demonstrate that there is a very clear connection between stories and events that unfold in the real world (for the most part) and the attention they get in the social web. This validates that social media is indeed social. We’re having conversations about the same things we do around the kitchen table as we do on laptops.