It’s becoming absolutely essential that online publishers are able to accurately measure, optimize and value the sharing and social habits of their audiences. Today, we introduced two new metrics and reports, Social Reach and the Audience Index, that will help publishers do just that.  You can also read about Erick Schonfeld’s take in Techcrunch and Gavin’s in Adotas.

Audience Index

Everyone has heard the old maxim, “Know your audience.” Until now, publishers may have known their demographic composition or “intent” profiles, but they didn’t know how their most valuable users – their influencers – compared to the rest of the web.  Our Audience Index changes all that by letting publishers:

- Understand and compare their social audiences against 850,000 other sites across the web and soon, against your own category (i.e. your site against sports) and size of site (i.e. your site against other small blogs).
- Find out what types of influencers – say Fitness or Music – your site attracts.
- Find out how well you connect with influencers, listeners and engaged consumers.

Social Reach

We recently surveyed publishers (ours and others) and found that over 60% wanted (and were missing) social referral analytics. Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the web by looking at outbound sharing and inbound social traffic and, in the process, gives proper credit to the listener/responder of a share as much as the original influencer/sharer. Publishers can now get a more accurate measurement of how a piece of content circulates around the Web after it’s been shared across any service, rather than just the simple number of shares counted by a single service like Facebook.

Social Reach is built in to all of ShareThis’ new share buttons that we introduced a couple of weeks ago, and the Social Reach score of each piece of content can be displayed on any page where our buttons are installed.  In fact, Social Reach is already being used by some exciting companies in new ways which we will share very soon.  Both of these tools are free if you are a ShareThis publisher. This is a rolling release, so if you don’t already have access to these new reports, please check back in the next 1-2 weeks or email us at beta@sharethis.com with questions.

We’re excited about the possibilities Social Reach and Audience Index open up for our publishers – both for editors who are trying to make quick content decisions and for product and advertising teams who are looking to validate and better define their social audiences. You can read more about social reach here

Infographic

We also wanted to give a network-wide update on our social data and how it’s trending across our 850,000 publishers – you can see updated data on outbound sharing, social reach and social engagement in our new Social Equation infographic. We’re going to be updating our data much more frequently so if you have stuff you’d like to see, let us know.

Tim
@schigel