Perry Belcher = 18
Conrad Hall = 90
These are our relative scores from Hubspot’s Twitter Grader. Does this make me a bigger twit than Perry?
“I’m a big twit!” Isn’t that a Jim Dandy conversation starter?
But I’m not the biggest…
Jeff Herring scores 99.99, Michel Fortin is at 99.96 and Pete Cashmore’s Mashable hits the jackpot with a perfect 100.
Hubspots Twitter Grader measures the power, reach and authority of any Twitter user. You can see from the double decimal spaces that their grader takes an extremely close look at who you are and what you’re doing.
To give you a better view of what those scores mean, here are all of our Rankings from the Twitter Grader:
Perry 4,380,962
Conrad 499,020
Jeff 650
Michel 2,603
Mashable 98
Notice the difference between Jeff’s ranking and Mashable’s. They’re only 0.01% apart in their grade, but it’s a difference of 552 points in their rankings.
So how does any of this help you monitor your social media marketing efforts?
Knowing how well you’re performing relative to other people in your niche shows you your return on investment.
Let’s say my goal is to have the same reach, power and authority on Twitter as Michel Fortin does. Now I know where I stand. A nice bonus is that Hubspots Twitter Grader also gives me some advice about how to improve my Twitter score. Visit http://twitter.grader.com to see how it works.
There are lots of ways to monitor the results of your social media marketing efforts, and they all help you determine what return you are getting for your investment. Today, I’m going to focus just on 2 tools offered by Hubspot.
My reason for zeroing in on Hubspot is that I think most folks are pretty much like me. Knowing how I’m doing is cool, but I really want some advice about what it means and how to get better. Hubspot gives me that, their tools are free, and the little, animated widget they use – the thing that shows while the reports are compiling – is surprisingly entertaining.
What the heck…If customers can buy for emotional reasons, it’s okay to like the watchamacallit on an outstanding site.
The other tool you should use – and I mean use it now, today, without delay – is their Website Grader. (http://website.grader.com)
I check my sites weekly right now because I’m making improvements. Checking more frequently might be helpful, but it seems more like getting on the bathroom scale every day. The changes you make to your site take a little bit of time to have an effect. My way of “giving it time” is to just do a website grade weekly.
If you want to see how you’re performing on a daily basis, install their badge on your site. They give you the code, and I put the badge onto www.themarketingspotlight.com in about 90 seconds today just using copy and paste.
Here are a few things Hubspots website grader showed me today:
My keywords are still a little too much. There are 75 keywords in the metadata for my blog. (Just imagine how many there were before!)
When I read through the list, all the keywords are relevant. But they are not all targetted. For example, “social bookmarking” is relevant to me because it’s part of social media. Okay, but it doesn’t really help me target my market. Another keyword “online social networking” does a much better job of targetting what I write about and what my target audience is looking for.
My domain expires in less than a year.
This isn’t such a big deal because www.themarketingspotlight.com has been around for a while. But it is a bigger deal if your site is brand new and you only registered the domain for one year – or worse, 6 months. That makes you look “fly by nightish.”
It’s also a handy thing to know. You can bet I’ve added “renew blog domain” to my To Do list for next week.
TheMarketingSpotlight.com ranks in the top 4.57% of blogs in the world.
According to Technorati, I’m in the top 5% of bloggers. That’s cool, and I like the sound of it, but it also pays to look at your actual ranking with Technorati before getting too excited. My ranking is 3,197,294. So I know I’m doing well, and that I have lots of room to improve.
These are just three of the things I learned about my website from using Hubspots website grader. There’s lots more in the report they gave me.
Before I let you go, there’s one more thing I want to point out about the website grader. Well, two things actually.
First, you can use the grader to look at any website you want. It doesn’t have to just be yours that you look at.
I like the way Michel Fortin has put his blog together, and his use of plugins is terrific. You know I’m putting a lot of effort into watching what he does, learning from him, and copying some of his techniques. So doesn’t it just make sense to use a tool like this to see how his site is doing?
I found comparing the report on his site to my own report truly helpful.
The other thing is that you can include other people’s sites in the report for your own site. For example, I included Michel’s site as well as Mashable and ProBlogger.net when I had my site graded this week. These are all sites I want to emulate, so it makes sense to compare my blog to theirs.
You can imagine that it’s also just a little humbling to see yourself compared to Pete Cashmore, Darren Rowse and Michel Fortin. So to keep things in perspective, I often (every other week) run a second report that compares me to other blogs that are close to my own level of development. This helps me think of small steps I can take on a regular basis to consistently improve.
Thanks for reading. Please take a second to mention which tools you use for monitoring your social media efforts by making a comment.