How To Track Social Media Using BLVD Status

A little over a year ago 10e20 covered the launch of BLVD Status over at Search Engine Land, and since then a few new features have been launched that really make this a powerhouse platform for Social Media analytics.  In case you haven’t heard of BLVD Status in the past, one of the best attributes is that it provides real time tracking, and it has been beefed up on steroids in this new version.  Here are a few of my favorite features for Social Media use:

Keyword Vitals

This is a really nice upgrade in my eyes because it really allows you to see and track the value of social media promotions on search engines in real time.  Talking about the intersection of search and social is always a hot topic, and BLVD can give you quantitative statistics on how your SMM promotions carry over to the SERPs.  Here is a quick sample of what you would see for a very long term keyword:

Basically, BLVD status allows you to view all search engine traffic from the entire domain and display by keyword.  This data can also be filtered by URL as well, which makes it really powerful.  The data provides the initial rankings of the page, the average rank for the time period, and the current rankings for that keyword and the overall conversions.  So tracking the time period after a social campaign vs. the time period before the campaign would easily give you data for how traffic, conversions and rankings increased from a search engine standpoint.  Pretty powerful stuff.

Here is a 1/4 day example (with today’s data!) for an article that Chris wrote earlier this year:

I could also see this feature executed down the road showing overall traffic from different social sites like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and the like to give you some real time social tracking vs historical data.

Alerts

Another new development with BLVD Status is to harness the power of the real-time reporting to kick out alerts to you and your client.  This new feature allows you to have reports generated based on traffic, referrals, campaigns or keywords.  Now any SEOs could see the power of having a real-time keyword alert for a drop in the SERPs:

…and how they could use this to be proactive (rather than reactive), but it can be leveraged for social media as well.  Having a real time traffic alert is crucial to see if a campaign has become popular or is getting social traffic.  You can see if you hit traffic levels that are abnormally high:

This will alert you to not only the traffic, but also help you find the location of this traffic.  So say you have a bit of success on Reddit that was unknown to you … well, these alerts will help you fan that fire and keep the momentum going.

Now referrer alerts can help you get more granular.   Right now there isn’t a particular alert that lets you know when you are getting pickup from a social site (ex. Digg) but with the right tweaks you can replicate this data!  Say you want to find out if you may have just been dugg – you can set up an alert that tracks traffic from a specific domain.  If you set up an alert to track 20 visits over a 10 minute period from Digg, you could have a great notifier for any stories that were dugg.  Or if you wanted to be alerted if a story reached the homepage of Digg so that you could watch the comments or monitor server health, you could implement the following parameters:

The alerts that have been updated in the newest version of BLVD status help notify you when something is happening to you or your client’s site, and the benefits for social media are numerous (and out of this world for SEO too).

When I was talking to Chris Bennett (owner of 97th Floor and one of the brainchilds behind the project) at SES San Jose and he was describing the changes, he kept calling them a “game-changer,” and after testing it out, I agree with him.  If you are still looking for more information about BLVD Status, there is an extremely detailed write up on all the new changes here, and you can also sign up at BLVD Status today!