Social platforms are playing an increasingly important role in how visitors access your content and discover your brand—currently about 22% of the attributable external traffic we measure comes from social sources. Is your social strategy up to the challenge? Armed with Chartbeat’s tools you can easily take advantage of your social presence with real-time tips and historical insights.
Real-Time Toolbox
The Big Board
Unite the entire newsroom around common metrics by displaying your real-time social data on the big screen.
The Chartbeat Big Board is perfect for those large screen displays in your newsroom. Configure the Big Board to show only social traffic, and see at a glance when something important is happening with your content—then jump to your Dashboard to take action.
Once you’ve moved to your Dashboard, first pivot on the ‘social’ traffic source. And if you want to make sure you’re always coming back to that view, you can even bookmark it in your browser for easy access!Now that you’re looking at just your social data, you can really start defining your social strategy:
Determine the best times of the day to push your content to your social audience.
Look at the 7-day view in the ‘Concurrents by Traffic Source’ graph to determine what times of day your site attracts the most readers from social.Don’t just look at the largest spikes and valleys — are there consistently smaller traffic influxes in the late afternoon or evening? Are you capitalizing on these times by pushing your best content to your social channels?
Understand your mobile audience’s experience.
Social traffic is dramatically more mobile-based than all other traffic: according to Chartbeat data, Facebook’s share of overall mobile referrals is 4x larger than its share on desktop, and Twitter’s share is 3.6x larger on mobile than on desktop.Use the device section to double pivot on mobile and see which articles are seeing the most engagement on smartphones—what does that mobile experience look like for those readers? Can they easily find additional content? Already using Facebook’s new Instant Article technology to further serve your content to a mobile, social audience? We can help with that. Once you’ve set up Chartbeat’s FBIA integration you can easily see how many readers of a story are engaging with your Instant Article content. 
Looking to get integrated? We’ve got you covered.
Know which content to promote on which social channel.
Facebook and Twitter are two of the most established and wide-reaching social channels to reach new readers, but how can you be strategic about which content to promote with which referrer?While Facebook and Twitter might lead to similar reader engagements, what’s important is their key loyalty indicator: recirculation for Facebook and engagement exceeding one minute for Twitter. So what do you do?
Sort the Top Pages section by recirculation and find your top three articles that are doing the best job at encouraging readers to dive deeper into your content. Push them on Facebook during your peak times of day for your best shot at audience conversion.
Toggle the Top Pages by Engaged Time and to find the content that’s holding the most attention—any of them racking up over a minute of Engaged Time? Now promote those stories on Twitter during your peak hours and really capture the attention of those readers.
Historical Insights
Report Builder
Go back in time and find existing content that brought in engaged social traffic.
Set up a report to hit your inbox every month to surface your top 10 articles that got the most attention from social sources—regardless of when they were published.Now you can build a running list of go-to list of evergreen articles that you should continue to work in to your promotion on a regular basis. And by comparing these reports month over month, you can identify star performers that consistently bring in more social traffic than the rest. These top performing articles should become highlighted fixtures in your social promotion strategy. To get started with this report, select the following parameters in the Report Builder interface, and check out the screenshot below for extra detail:Add metrics: Total engaged time (add this metric first to pull your top articles by total engaged seconds), Average engaged time, Unique cookies, Page views, Loyal visitor page views, Quality page viewsAdd groups: Title, AuthorAdd filters: Page type (select ‘Article’ from the drop-down), Referrer Type (select ‘social’ from the drop-down)If you’re a little rusty, check out our support site for more information on these metrics.
Want even more insights on setting your social strategy? Check out our Social Media Insider Guide here.
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