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miercuri, 13 februarie 2013

Social Authority: Our Measure of Twitter Influence

Posted: 12 Feb 2013 07:04 PM PST

[This blog post is co-authored by Matt Peters, our Data Scientist.]

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Social Authority, our metric of Twitter users’ influence. There are plenty of vanity metrics out there, but Social Authority offers something compellingly different.

Social Authority Helps Marketers

Social Authority is not about bragging rights or merchant discounts. Nor is it something that you check once and then forget about. Our metric is immediately, reliably useful. You can order all active Twitter users by influence, dissect your social graph, or find new followers who are most important -- right now.

But it’s more than just exploring your own followers (or those of a competitor): Social Authority is ultimately a measure of influential activity. As such, it highlights content that is successful on Twitter. When you find users with high Social Authority, you’re finding great marketing strategies to analyze and mimic. And we think that this will help you be more successful with Twitter.

Finally, Social Authority is transparent. We could use all sorts of fuzzy words to explain how we compute our score, but we recognize that marketers need to see the “man behind the curtain.” Without insight into how we value influence, you can’t personally validate what makes us special, nor can you trust that our score is backed by deep research and thought.

Social Authority is Based on Retweets

Quite simply, our score includes three components:

The retweet rate of a few hundred of the measured user’s last non-@mention tweets
A time decay to favor recent activity versus ancient history
Other data for each user (such as follower count, friend count, and so on) that are optimized via a regression model trained to retweet rate

We’ll discuss why we’re focusing on retweets in a moment. For now, let’s consider the latter two items.

First, social media is very much a “what have you done for me lately” medium. In fact, the half-life of a tweet is a mere 18 minutes.

For this reason, we aggressively discount scores for users who haven’t tweeted lately.

Second, our regression model is a powerful addition to Social Authority. In part, it helps smooth the occasionally jumpy retweet rates of users. But, more than that, it accounts for the fact that retweets are a scarce commodity. For example, an average user needs 10,000 followers before 25% of their tweets are retweeted. Indeed, it’s only very popular users who get a large percentage of their tweets retweeted.

Our regression model helps fill in the blanks for the large majority of users with a spotty history of retweets.

Retweets are the Currency of Social

So, why retweets?

Well, whether you call them “shares” (Facebook), “repins” (Pinterest), or retweets, circulating someone else’s content to your network is a remarkable activity -- and pretty much universal across all social networks. It demonstrates a significant commitment to the originating content.

Moreover, retweets are a great proxy for other important data.

For example, as you might expect, the number of retweets a user gets correlates strongly with the number of @mentions that user receives, with a correlation of ~0.8.

Even more excitingly, a higher retweet rate is associated with more traffic to tweeted URLs. In fact, the retweet rate is a stronger predictor of clicks than follower count! The correlations are ~0.7 and ~0.45, respectively.

This comparison is perhaps not entirely fair: Twitter-originating traffic counts are hard to obtain in large quantities. So, we limit ourselves only to users who use bit.ly shortened links: perhaps not a totally representative sample. We also apply the same time discount to our traffic rate as we do to our retweet rate; this may heighten the correlation.

Still, it’s exciting to see that retweets are a great measure of traffic potential.

You might ask, “Why not just use traffic as the basis for Social Authority?” Well, while clicks might be your ultimate goal, that isn’t the same for everyone. Indeed, retweets represent a native measure of social success. That is, for many accounts, traffic isn’t the goal. Rather, the focus is on increased engagement and resonance of one’s social content. Retweets are a better social-specific metric.

(By the way, a good rule of thumb: consider a 10:1 ratio when it comes to clicks and retweets. That is, if a tweet gets 10 retweets, it’s probably garnering about 100 clicks. We’ll delve into this in a future blog post.)

What Does Social Authority Mean in Practice?

Do we add value beyond what’s already out there? That’s a good question. After all, follower count by itself is a great measure of influence. And it’s the challenge of any metric creator to offer something appreciably better.

Here, for example, we see that Klout scores correlate strongly with follower counts.

We aren’t picking on Klout. Social Authority has a similar relationship to follower count. Quite simply, people with lots of followers are generally more influential!

But we believe it’s the subtle re-ranking of a users that reveals the value of Social Authority versus follower count (or other metrics out there).

First, behold the most followed accounts on Twitter....

Now, we’re going to use Followerwonk to sort all active Twitter users and show you those with the highest Social Authority.

Yes, we also put Bieber on top! (Who doesn’t!?)

We’ve highlighted a number of accounts in red. Take a close look at these. We were initially surprised to see these accounts with high Social Authority so we went back and checked the data. Sure enough, these accounts get retweeted a lot. For example, @autocorrects is retweeted 7% more than @BarackObama, yet has 14 times fewer followers!

As you can see, Social Authority surfaces a completely different set of top users: those that are extremely effective in engaging their followers. Perhaps jump onto Twitter and look at their content. Expand their tweets: that’s where the magic is. Those in red often have a similar content strategy: short, pithy, often humorous, and targeted well to their audience.

This isn’t content that we necessarily like -- often, quite the opposite! Rather, these accounts have found the secret sauce: retweet bait. They’ve discovered content that gets their audiences’ attention, whether we like it or not, and prompts action in terms of retweets and traffic.

To us, at least, this is a revelation. We’ve always assumed that success on Twitter was largely about careful engagement, timely replies, and, sure, the occasional pithy remark. And that indeed may be a great strategy. But from the perspective of retweets (and clicks), engagement doesn’t matter at all. Many of these accounts never @mention anyone.

Social Authority is focused on content, versus users. When computing our metric, we don’t directly care how many followers a user has. Instead, our interest is in the content that she creates, and how it resonates with her audience. This is what sets Social Authority apart as a metric.

Let’s take a look at how you can leverage Social Authority right now.

Social Authority Use Case: Refining Your Engagement Strategy

One of the most effective uses of Twitter is to reach out to other people. That is, you want to leverage other people to retweet your content and spread your message to their audience.

Social Authority and the engagement metrics we released in December can help.

Simply, you want to find that sweet spot of users who are both influential, and also likely to respond to any engagement that you direct at them.

Step 1. Go to Followerwonk and do a bio search for keywords related to your industry. Limit the search to your followers. (Here’s an example.)

Step 2. Sort by Social Authority.

Step 3. Mouse over each user and find those with a high engagement rate. This will reveal possible candidates for direct engagement (DMs, @contacts, or even RTs of their content).

Here, for example, are the most influential followers of @followerwonk with “SEO” in their bio.

On mouse-over, I see that Rand has a really high engagement rate. Over 60% of his tweets are @mentions of other people! Notice that we have a bidirectional relationship (the little arrows): that is, he follows us, and we follow him. He’d be a great one to contact (if we weren’t already seeing him in the office pretty much everyday)!

Social Authority Use Case: Content Insights

Let’s say you’re thinking of opening a restaurant in the Bay Area. How can you use Twitter, and Social Authority, to help?

We can start by doing a comparison of the followers of three restaurant owners or Food writers.

In this report, we see that there are ~400 who follow all of them. We can pop this list of users open and sort by Social Authority.

As we mouse-over each user, we discover their engagement rates. Note that @chefsymon, with the highest Social Authority in this list, has a rocking 86% engagement rate! Compare this to, say, Zagats with a mere 6.5% rate.

Which is the better choice to @engage in an attempt to attract their attention (and retweets)?

But there’s more we can do with this list then find potential brand amplifiers. Notice, for example, that @Francis_Lam, with a “mere” 34,000 followers has a great Social Authority score. It’s worth jumping into his tweet stream and looking carefully at his content.

What is it about his style that generates so many retweets? His frequent tweeting? His food-related one-liners?

While we will discuss content strategies in a later blog post, we believe that, to some extent, there are different content strategies for each industry. What works well for one audience, won’t work for others. So, carefully examining high Social Authority users -- particularly those who are outliers in terms of having relatively few followers -- is a great way to discover the content that ignites your audience.

We can take this one step further still. We can analyze @Francis_Lam’s followers.

Then, we can hone in those high Social Authority users local to us. Perhaps a special invite to a soft opening?

Bottom line

One of our core values at SEOmoz is transparency. As such, we’re against “mystery meat” metrics. We believe that metrics are only enhanced when you have real insight into what goes into them.

Social Authority is a tool for marketers to find key relationships and great content strategies. It’s backed by serious research and development.

We welcome your feedback, and look forward to seeing how you’ll take advantage of our score.

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February Mozscape Index is Live

Posted: 12 Feb 2013 05:00 AM PST

Posted by carinoverturf

The latest Mozscape index is now live - just two and a half weeks after our last January index release! The team continues to improve the frequency of our release dates as we move closer toward consistent 2 week release cycles. All Mozscape data has been refreshed across all our applications so you can see the latest data in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

Over the past few months, the Mozscape processing team has put a lot of work into removing the unpredictable variables that led to several missed release dates in 2012. Switching to the large super computing reserved instances on AWS has led to much smoother processing cycles and less machine failures to recover from. The team has also been able to isolate several steps in our processing software that could benefit from some optimization. These updates have led to a significant amount of time saved during processing due to fewer disruptions and more efficiently running software.

As a result of all these changes the team has implemented over the past few months, four of the last five indexes have been released within 3 weeks or less of each other - which means fresher and more frequent data for you!

You can see from the metrics below, there is still a significant increase in the number of subdomains crawled in this index. The increase of subdomains is due to our crawlers discovering a small number of root domains that have a substantial number of subdomains associated with them. These subdomains have very low authority, so they won't affect the metrics in the index, however, the numbers of subdomains has increased again.

Here are the metrics for this latest index:

77,093,101,764 (77 billion) URLs
4,263,496,373 (4.2 billion) Subdomains
160,052,583 (160 million) Root Domains
840,437,839,728 (840 billion) Links
Followed vs. Nofollowed
- 2.26% of all links found were nofollowed
- 56.49% of nofollowed links are internal
- 43.51% are external
Rel Canonical - 15.05% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
The average page has 73 links on it
- 62.66 internal links on average
- 10.27 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google's US search results:

Page Authority - 0.36
Domain Authority - 0.19
MozRank - 0.24
Linking Root Domains - 0.30
Total Links - 0.25
External Links - 0.29

Crawl histogram for the February Mozscape Index

This index took a total of 11 days to complete processing so a fairly large portion of the data was crawled in the second half of January. The oldest crawl data will be from late December, but the bulk of this index was crawled after January 15th.

We always love to hear your thoughts! And remember, if you're ever curious about when Mozscape is updating, you can check the calendar here. We also maintain a list of previous index updates with metrics here.

8 Reasons Why Google Authorship Might be The Most Important Thing You Adopt This Year

8 Reasons Why Google Authorship Might be The Most Important Thing You Adopt This Year

Posted: 12 Feb 2013 04:47 AM PST

Each year, webmasters and marketing managers are faced with new developments and technologies, and it can be hard to know which to adopt and which to ignore. But Google Authorship is not one something to casually disregard.

Google's AuthorRank can strengthen the SEO value of pages published by a particular individual and now is the time to climb on board – before your competitors do.

This simple HTML tag – built around the rel=”author” or rel="publisher" command – specifies that a certain individual wrote the page, and this is proved by adding a reciprocal link back to that page or site from their Google+ profile.

It’s a fairly elegant way of making the Authorship of online pages provable, but you might be wondering if it is worth the effort of adding it to your own pages. Here are some of the most compelling reasons to consider doing so early in 2013.

AuthorRank makes authority matter

Adopt Authorship now and you can begin to build your reputation in Google’s eyes, something that could be difficult to catch up later on.

Remember, the ‘authority’ given to any one author is based on their entire publishing history of articles that include the rel=”author” tag, and which are reciprocally linked from the individual’s Google+ profile.

If you wait until AuthorRank is clearly here to stay before you begin using it, you risk giving your competitors a head start from which you might never recover.

Luckily, because AuthorRank is so easy to implement, it shouldn’t place a huge administrative burden on you – making it a relatively low-risk move to begin using it immediately, especially compared with the long-term risks associated with delaying its uptake.

AuthorRank gives priority to primary sources

If you’re a primary-source publisher, writing anything from opinion-based blogs to technical documents and press releases, Authorship allows you to claim ownership of that content ahead of any third-party sites that then report it.

This might not totally prevent other sites from republishing your content without permission – and therefore triggering Google’s ‘very similar content’ filter – but it at least gives you some ability to claim Authorship of your pages.

You can also use the rel=”canonical” tag if the same page must be published in more than one place (the common example is if a document is published online in both HTML and PDF format), so that Google knows this was deliberate, was not an example of plagiarism, and which of the pages to treat as the ‘primary’ source.

Authorship is instant

Add your author tag to a page (and reciprocate that link on your Google+ profile) and it instantly receives the benefit of your authority (at least theoretically) – unlike similar previous systems such as PageRank, which take time to develop as external sites link in to your page. Having said that, I do need to point out that Google's John Mueller recently stated during a Google Plus Hangout, that author rank isn't used at present to rank webpages based on an author's reputation score. However, The Wall Street Journal published seven predictions made by Eric Schmidt – former CEO of Google, and their current executive chairman – in his up-coming book "The New Digital Age", states:

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.

Many SEOs believe that Schmidt is referring to Google's use of author rank in the future. However, by building on your reputation score now, you can reap its benefits once it's actually implemented.

Granted, it will take some time for a new author to build substantial AuthorRank, but when that author’s name is placed on a new page from that point onwards, the page will benefit immediately.

Unlike any other form of SEO (at least, to the extent that this is the case with AuthorRank), this is a method that places the direct online value of a page in close alignment with the human value of its author, as measured in terms of their past writing career. That means the page in the future, can receive an instant boost in value, as soon as it is crawled by Google.

Authorship transcends media formats

If your post contains little plain text, but is rich in media that has traditionally been difficult to crawl, an author tag helps Google consider it as significant as your plain-text posts.

This is important because there are still relatively few ways to directly impact the SEO of non-text content, particularly if you don’t count methods that are not entirely within your control, such as inbound linking.

A rel=”author” tag is also much simpler to add to your page’s HTML than a detailed microformat description of your multimedia content, which is the other ‘best’ method of optimising for non-text elements at present.

AuthorRank defeats spam

As more authoritative sources rise to the top of Google’s search results, spammy publishers will be easier to remove. Potentially, they could stop appearing in the early results pages altogether.

This is clearly a fairly utopian ambition, but it’s a uniquely compelling reason to adopt Authorship too; if all legitimate publishers start using the tag, spammy publishers can be isolated completely.

Even if you’re not altruistic enough to change your website template purely in a global effort to combat spam, the same argument applies equally compellingly the other way around; woe betide the web publisher who finds himself perceived by Google as being spam.

Only by adopting the use of the tag can you be sure that you won’t fall foul of this risk – which should be a compelling reason for any publisher to get behind it.

AuthorRank helps third-party publishers

If you’re a third-party publisher without a history of authoritative posts behind you, AuthorRank can still help you. If you can ask an authoritative writer to contribute to your posts, this could boost the overall authority associated with your site.

Remember, Authorship is about the perceived importance of the individual, not of the site on which they are writing – in effect, the site receives an assessment of importance based on the AuthorRank of its contributors, rather than based on any of its content.

This equally means there are new opportunities being created for writers with strong AuthorRank, who should soon be able to market themselves to new websites as being able to provide content with unassailable built-in SEO value.

Authorship is being built in

The rel=”author” tag is increasingly important in Google’s search results, and should be fairly easy to build into your CMS or site template, allowing you to reduce the admin associated with stating the author of a page.

In order to add Authorship to a new site, you should only have to add the appropriate author tag to your page’s header template, and it should then appear on each new page you publish automatically.

A single reciprocal link from your Google+ profile to the new site should then be enough to demonstrate that the Authorship tags are legitimate, and start including them in your virtual canon as you publish each new article.

Google+ is becoming mandatory

Google owns plenty of web properties besides Google Search, and it's placing Google+ at the heart of these sites. The social network won't just curate your authored pages, you could need an account simply to sign up for other Google resources.

This is apparent if you take a look at the discrepancy between Google’s official statistics of how many ‘active users’ are logging into Google+ each month, and the general mood in which those figures are discussed on other social networks.

Even experienced online marketers and social networking experts are doubtful of the official statistics, but if anything this demonstrates the importance of Authorship. If Google is powerful enough to bring all of its web properties together in such a way, then you should be seriously considering adopting any innovation of theirs that has a clear and stated effect on your search ranking.

Are you using Google Authorship to improve your SEO? How have you found it? Share your experiences with me and other readers using the comments below.

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Seth's Blog : The mirror and the periscope

The mirror and the periscope

A long time ago, real estate developers figured out that one way to save a lot of money was to put a mirror in the lobby next to the elevator banks. People would happily look at themselves in the mirror while patiently waiting for the elevator... meaning that the developers could get by with one fewer (expensive) elevator.

If we want to, we can turn social media (and our day) into a giant mirror. "I wonder what they think of me?" "I wonder what their reaction was to what we just shipped?" "I wonder if they've figured out I'm a fraud?" We hide this mirror gazing under the guise of customer research, but particularly for soloists, artists and anyone who puts her name on her work, what an opportunity to waste time and energy checking out what the online world tells us about our role in the universe.

On the other hand, social networks now give us a better opportunity than ever to find out how other people are doing. "I wonder if Trish is happy?" "I hope that those protesters have enough blankets." "Are our children learning?"

It's human nature to care how the tribe (and strangers) think about us. It's more important, though, to wonder how they feel about themselves.