media seo analytics | push2digital

Changing behavior is one the most challenging missions a digital media team can tackle and yet it's the key component to digital businesses. In most cases we want the user to perform some action for the first time or more often such as -- buy our book, read our stories, like our Facebook page, share our video clip, register for our e-mail newsletter or share information about themselves.

Want to capture the attention of your news director or GM? Try closing the loop on your social media efforts with a reference to higherTV Ratings.

[Scene: GM crosses newsroom, digital director trails speaking with elaborate hand gestures. GM stops, head tilted, one eye squinting, ‘Huh? … Wait what did you say?]

That’s right, according to a Nielsen study, (see full report Nielsen -- Social Buzz Impacts TV Ratings) social buzz generated about a TV program shows some moderate correlation to TV ratings. Lost Remote quotes Facebook’s Andy Mitchell, that he’s “pretty confident” a recent USA Network promotion linked to “Psych’s” Facebook helped drive a 10% ratings increase.

The Nielsen study asserts the same stating that increases in what they define as “social buzz” -- a formula based on social mentions, # of authors and other factors – generates ratings increases on a scale as strong as 9 to 1 [9% increase in buzz correlates to 1% increase in ratings for certain demographics].

It’s not a silver bullet, but the framework for proof that social media’s impact on the broadcast partner is emerging.

It's a good question, "What is the best day to publish content?"

It depends on your content, target audience and approach ... basically your digital strategy [if you don't have one, check out this post on building a web measurement model].

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

Let's assume you're a media site that generates 20% to 30% of your traffic from search and another 10% to 20% from social. That's a pretty good chunk of your audience acquisition that depends on others (ie. Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.)

So what if you could obtain greater exposure by analyzing what days generate the most referrals? Good start huh, because if you average 50 FB referrals on Mon., 62 on Tue., 64 on Wed., 48 on Thu., 52 on Fri, 22 on Sat. and 18 on Sun. -- that tells you something right?

It does, but not entirely.

To get a clear picture, you have to factor in how many pieces of content you're pushing out on those days. If you're publishing 95 stories on weekdays and 32 stories on weekends, that's significant. Therefore you want to know the referrals-per-story.

WHERE’S THE OPPORTUNITY?

Dan Zarella published a study on the ideal time to submit blog posts that states the ideal Twitter retweet sweet spot is Friday @ 4p ET.  He also claims that Facebook sharing is highest @ 9a ET and spikes significantly on Saturday.

This confirms data I've seen that stories published on Saturday generate approximately 60% more Facebook and Google referrals per story than those published during the week. Sunday stories show @ 25% more Facebook and 40% more Google referrals per story. The problem is that these spikes are often masked by the total number of referrals which are typically lower on the weekends.

HOW TO MEASURE REFERRALS PER STORY?

Your results may vary, so you should review your own metrics and build this formula. The trick is to compile total number of stories published for the year and break them down by day. In Excel you can apply a formula =WEEKDAY(A1) [A1 is your first date] to convert that date to a simple day of the week. Then you can apply a filter by clicking the header of the Day of the Week column you just created, click Data Tab and Filter button. That will allow to group your yearly data by all the Mondays, Tuesdays, etc. If that sounds confusing, read this post on using Excel's WEEKDAY function.

Once you have the year's stories published and referrals broken down by day of the week, you can build your weekday referral rate. Repeat for each day, and repeat for each source (Google, Twitter, Facebook or any other key referral source.)

(Monday Facebook Referrals / Monday Stories Published = [Monday Facebook referrals per story])

OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTION

The takeaway here is not, "don't publish on weekdays", but that there is a greater opportunity to be shared and ranked on the weekends, Saturday in particular. And content published that is geared towards a Facebook morning audience or Google topics could do significantly better during this time frame. It’s not a simple task, but it’s not rocket science either and worth the time, especially if you can generate more audience with no real extra work – just a smarter choice of publish times and content topics.

Most media groups, by now, understand how important the use of keywords, title tags, bread crumbs, topic clusters are to exposing their content to the widest possible audience. 

But as with most good ideas, knowing what to do and executing it are two very different things.

That’s because identifying the proper keyword terms to target, selecting the proper category [which drive your bread crumbs], linking to content that’s directly related to your new story can be time-consuming and labor intensive.

Anyone who works in media can tell you – Content may be king, but speed to market is often the Judge.  That’s why when it comes to properly optimizing a story vs. getting it out – the keywords, tags and links can be left on the cutting room floor.

But there is help. New tools and APIs are emerging that leverage natural language processing that automates not just a keyword search, but a true understanding of what that content is about. TextWise is one such company offering APIs that provide automated content analysis that can return the story’s appropriate category, metadata, title tag, topic tags as well as match it to other relevant content.  Plus the API calls are free to a point, @ 20K per day, and can be purchased beyond that level.

If you’re not API-savvy, there’s a widget for Similarity Search that’s plug-and-play, as well as a WordPress plug-in.

With tools like these, content creators can start to move from the good ideas that live on the “if I have time” list, to a process that executes good ideas every time.