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Track links shared onto Google+ with awe.sm

By jec in awe.sm, Marketing & Promotion, Publishing 

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awe.sm loves google+

Only two days into its “field trial,” it’s still too early to know if Google+ will be a Facebook killer, but the new social network already is a hit among those lucky enough to have squeezed in before new signups were suspended because of “insane demand.”

If you got into the trial — or you’re patiently still waiting for your invitation to come through (any minute now…) — here’s good news: awe.sm now tracks the links that you share on Google+.

Google+ button in awe.sm publisherIn our publisher tool and the awe.sm bookmarklet, you’ll notice a new shortener icon for Google+. To share a webpage, photo, or video, use our button to create a tracking link, then paste that link into your Google+ stream.

Your Circles will see a title, summary, & preview image from the original destination URL, but we’ll track clicks and conversions from that link right alongside the links you publish to other channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. By creating a unique tracking link for each time you share to a social network, we can measure the performance of each share action and each channel. The goal, as always: make an apples-to-apples comparison of all of your social media marketing efforts in one place, so you can understand what content works, where, and why.

The weeks ahead will be interesting. Google+ will be adding more users and features, awe.sm will be adding enhancements to fine-tune what sharing behavior you can track, and patterns should start to emerge about how users engage with this new network. It’s too soon to draw any conclusions or make any recommendations except this: share some links, analyze their performance, and focus on actionable data, not buzz.

For more background on how awe.sm works, see Jonathan’s piece on how awe.sm uses tracking links. If you have any questions, ideas, or observations — or want a cool teeshirt — drop us a line.

Google launches Google+. Now what?

By jec in awe.sm, Marketing & Promotion 

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Google Plus

This morning, Google launched Google+, a new social network. This announcement brings a lot to digest and understand, and a lot is still to be revealed. At the moment, the project is still available only to a select group of invitees, and it is in “field trial”, with new features still to come and major tweaks to its current features possible. (Check out TechCrunch’s first impressions, and some screenshots on Mashable.)

What we already know is that it provides a powerful and potentially huge new channel for users and social media marketers to share, discover and distribute content. This makes it more important than ever for marketers to to understand how social media works.

What’s being shared? Who’s sharing it? What value is generated by the traffic that sharing attracts?

Does a share on Twitter bring more clicks than on Facebook? Which channel generates more re-shares, more conversions? Do I need different messaging when I push content to each channel? Is my time and energy better spent building up my network on this new service, or maintaining engagement on my existing ones?

These are the questions awe.sm is built to answer. We provide marketers and content publishers a unified view of performance: real performance, measured in sales and page views, not just likes and mentions. And we do it across all social networks: the ones you know, and the new ones still being invented.

As the social space fragments, you need a unified view to compare apples to apples. If you’re wondering how we can help you, drop us a line, then pop some popcorn: no matter the outcome of Google+, this summer will be interesting to watch.