I love social sharing buttons. I like them because they can serve as quiet little social calls-to-action, enticing content readers to share my articles on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. But I love them because they tell me (and everyone else) how many times those articles have been shared. Simple, transparent social media metrics.
And because these buttons are so popular, if I feel an urge to compare the sharing data for my content with that of my competitors' content, I can typically just navigate to the other site and see what that website's buttons say. But some sites don’t have those social sharing buttons set up. And without those public-facing sharing buttons, there’s no good way for me to check up on how many times a given URL was shared.
That’s why I created LinkTally.com. It’s a super simple, free tool that allows you to enter any URL (even from your competitors' sites) to find out how many times it was shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.
For instance, while the Wall Street Journal's website includes social sharing buttons for those four main social networks on its articles, it doesn’t show share counts. But by pasting the URL into LinkTally.com, I can see the tally for one of its recent articles:
How Marketers Can Use LinkTally
Okay, so that’s interesting, but how useful is it really? After all, there’s a difference between scholastic “data for data’s sake” and actually actionable, in the trenches, useful data. And I’m only really only concerned with the latter.
Let's consider an example scenario. Let's say I create content for the search engine optimization niche, and I want to identify the ratio of sharing that occurs on each of the four social sites so I can determine if it’s worthwhile to spend time promoting my content on LinkedIn. I’d simply go to a popular SEO site, like SEOMoz, grab a few article URLs, and LinkTally them.
Many sites, including SEOMoz, don’t display LinkedIn sharing count buttons, so without the tool, you’d be in the dark. But with the tool, we see that LinkedIn numbers compare reasonably well with the other three sites. Had we noticed a much lower LinkedIn count across a number of articles, that might be a sign that LinkedIn isn't the most important social network on which to focus your content sharing efforts.
That's not the only thing LinkTally is useful for. There are a ton of other smart ways you can make use of this little tool:
- Compare the success of blog article topics on a number of sites to brainstorm new content ideas.
- Determine which content formats (e.g. infographics vs. text-based-content vs. video content, etc.) are most popular for social sharing.
- Pinpoint which social networks to use to help launch certain types of content in the future? (For example, if you notice that infographics take off on Facebook, or your LinkedIn audience prefers content about certain topics.)
- Check out the social reach of various blogs to identify targets for guest blogging.
- Measure the social success of your competitors' content for benchmarking purposes.
In fact, I bet you can come up with a few more awesome ways to use this tool yourself. Try the tool out for yourself, and share your own ideas in the comments below!
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Don Metznik 9:11 AM on February 25, 2013
Dan,
You make us all look like wizards.
Thanks,
Carrie 9:13 AM on February 25, 2013
This is interesting, but I'm curious how it handles shortened links.Can you truly get an accurate count if people share with different shorteners?
Mike Wolfe 9:26 AM on February 25, 2013
Thank you. Was just having a conversation with a client regarding this. Appreciate you making it easy for me!
LeeAnn 9:28 AM on February 25, 2013
What a great tool! It will help with both my business and my clients' businesses!! *THANK YOU*
David Watson 9:40 AM on February 25, 2013
Awesome little tool thank you! I know a lot of people that will start using this. :)
creeem 9:43 AM on February 25, 2013
Nice tool But there are some bugs.
Here is one error >>> You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ' 16488, 564, 11828, 'www.adobe.com', 1361803307)' at line 1
It does not display G+ properly. Its highly unlikely that www.adobe.com has no G+
creeem 9:44 AM on February 25, 2013
A firefox/chrome plugin would be awesome ;-).
Thanks for keeping this free
Jeremy 9:54 AM on February 25, 2013
Great tool. Thanks.
BTW: I found a really useful service over the weekend. www.reasons2call.com. Helps users reconnect with all their LinkedIn contacts. Makes LinkedIn far more useful.
Dave Alan 9:55 AM on February 25, 2013
I been using a similar tool which does this in realtime and has daily email notifications.
http://daily-pulse.harkable.com/
Diana Urban (@dianaurban) 10:07 AM on February 25, 2013
Another use case for LinkTally is when putting together a list of blogs you want to guest blog for. If it's an influential blog that's worth creating content for, hopefully they already have a decent readership who like to share their content. Great job Dan!
Dedicated server montreal 10:31 AM on February 25, 2013
Thanks , that definately going into my toolbox.!
Andrew Stapinski 10:34 AM on February 25, 2013
Just brilliant!
Ronhilton 10:57 AM on February 25, 2013
Sounds great but I am confuse with the results it's given in return. I have tried with this post URL itself in LinkTally and the counts I am getting there is not same as here on left had side social bar panel. So why is so happen and what's methodology behind counting those share will be more appreciate. Thanks!
Pamela Vaughan 11:53 AM on February 25, 2013
@Creeem: Thanks for the heads up. This should be all fixed now.
Jeanne Gumbleton 12:27 PM on February 25, 2013
It looks like you need to have seperate URL's for each page on a website. It would be nice if it searched through the whole website and came back with stats for all the pages. Otherwise, great idea!
Holly 12:29 PM on February 25, 2013
What is the time-frame for the report? Daily shares? Weekly? Ever? Thanks.
Hassan Reda 12:47 PM on February 25, 2013
Thank you so much for sharing this great tool! Can't wait to see it expand and grow!!
Philip 1:01 PM on February 25, 2013
What I don't understand is this...if I share a page with my Facebook friends by clicking a Facebook share icon on a website page...then I assume that the link is only visible to my friends, right? So that link would not be visible to the public or Google. And how would Google or anyone else know that the page was shared?
How does LinkTally.com count Facebook shares that are shared only on private walls?
Laura Lavelle 1:03 PM on February 25, 2013
This is awesome - thank you!
Nancy Smeltzer 1:15 PM on February 25, 2013
I was wondering what the time frame is also. For the past week? For the most recent posting? I don't see how I can correlate the numbers if I don't know which blog posting they're associated with... or do I put in the specific URl for that blog?
Dan Zarrella 1:20 PM on February 25, 2013
The timeframe is "ever." As in how many times the URL was shared in it's entire lifetime, as reported by the search engines.
Dan Zarrella 1:22 PM on February 25, 2013
The tool tells you how many times specific URLs were shared, so yes, put in a specific blog post URL if that's what you want to measure.
Christina Tarkoff 4:34 PM on February 25, 2013
Thanks for the tool. Also thanks to @dianaurban for the clever application.
iGoByDoc 5:11 PM on February 25, 2013
Pretty cool tool. A lot cleaner looking than others I have used.
Will you be adding Pinterest to the count?
A tool like this, but in a spreadsheet format would be a lot more helpful. Spreadsheet that continually updates.
Thanks for the tool.
Doc
James Everhart 7:28 PM on February 25, 2013
My first reaction was wondering if someone like me, a small online business owner, could utilize these metrics, and after some thought I think it could: making my blog entries mirror some of the same or similar lines of pseudo-viral likes. Thank you for the ideas!
David Gadarian 9:17 PM on February 25, 2013
Great stuff. What I'd love is to also have an actual social link list to see who did what, so raw #'s and then below a blown up list of all the people that took an action with a breakdown of what they actually had to say with each share.
Right now I've been using Bing.com/social for specific terms which has been very informative in some situations.
That said, great work on this! Thanks so much for sharing.
Valerie Weingrad 7:42 AM on February 26, 2013
What is the time frame of the review?
Michael King 10:35 AM on February 26, 2013
Check out SocialCrawlytics, it's an app that crawls full sites and gives you all the social shares. http://www.socialcrawlytics.com
Also sharedcount.com does what Linktally does, but you can also give it multiple URLs.
Dan 12:18 PM on February 26, 2013
Just tried this with our homepage (Introhive.com) but it is showing 0 via Twitter. When I drop the same url into Twitter search it is bringing back results. Thoughts on what might be causing this?
Dan Stratton 12:44 PM on February 26, 2013
Ignore previous comment. Figured out the problem. Including https instead of http in the URL solved everything
Donna DM Yates 1:54 PM on February 26, 2013
Useful tool! I liked it and will use it again.
Peg McDermott 12:55 PM on February 27, 2013
Great tool, thanks for sharing!
Nina 12:15 AM on March 01, 2013
Thanks for creating and sharing LinkTally.com
Marco D'Amico 10:08 AM on March 03, 2013
Very great tool!
To stay in topic of web tools I suggest this tool that allows you to increase the sharing of your content: http://postabout.it .