Calculating your true social reach?

It’s an interesting question and one that’s difficult to monitor. Mentions on Twitter are easy to monitor, I have my Twitter set up to mail me when someone mentions me, but unfortunately, that doesn’t catch all. Let me show you and example.

Last week I wrote a blog post on how social media and digital print can work in harmony. I tweeted the link which led to the following results:

• 91 views on my blog
• 2 Mentions
• 9 New followers
• 1 Re-Tweet

Not great you may think. I then receive an e-mail from Social Media Today to say they have published my post on their site: Here

Results:

• 210 views on SMT
• 86 referrals back to my blog
• Lots of sharing

It’s the ‘lots of sharing’ piece where monitoring your reach falls down. Social Media Today, as well as many other sites is set up so that when you tweet from their page it doesn’t ‘Mention’ @gareth_case for example, but @SocialMediaToday instead. And so my analysis comes to a grinding halt. At least it would if it wasn’t for tools such as Tweet Reach – @tweetreachapp.

Tweet Reach will tell you just how many people your tweet, or better still in this case, a string of keywords have reached. So I do a search for “gareth case” and low and behold, here are my results:

If you look at the results and some of the actual tweets, I am not even mentioned so without this tool would have no idea of my true reach. But in this instance, my blog post has reached 313,669 people. And this only monitors the last 50 tweets associated to those keywords, so in reality it’s probably a lot more.

When I add to this the number of hits from LinkedIn, Google+ and the ones still to come in over the next few days, this post could have ‘reached’ half a million people. Not bad for 15 minutes work. Now I am not naive enough to realise that all of these people will click-through to my blog post, or even see it in their timelines, but it’s interesting to see how far one tweet can travel.

Do some searching on your own content today, you may be pleasantly surprised.

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