Social Crawlytics is a tool which was developed a few months ago by Yousaf Sekand (@ysekand). The tool allows you to crawl a website and get a report on the social statistics of that website on social media: how much were specific pages shared on different social networks? It will give you some great insights.
Yousaf now has released a new version of the tool, which is cleaner, even easier to work with than before and much faster. And the basis reports are still very much free. There are also paid plans which will give you
How does it work?
The tool is very easy to use. You just go to the site, login with your Twitter account and you are set to go for the basic plan.
You type in your website details, schedule your plan and off you go. Now all you do is wait until he tool is done.
As a result you get an overview page with all the statistics of the site. Take a look at the statistics dashboard page for State of Search:
What we can conclude from these results is that, not unexpectedly, State of Search is most social on Twitter. But interesting is that Google+ and Linkedin seem to be doing a lot better than we thought, even better than Facebook. And to be honest, we haven’t spent that much time optimising our things for these two platforms. We should maybe work on that!
Why is it so cool?
So why is this tool so amazing? Why are several people around the web highly enthusiastic about this tool? The answer is simple: within just a few clicks you have an overview of what content is most ‘social’, and not just on Twitter, on multiple social networks.
Yousaf Sekander himself puts it as follows:
“Social Crawlytics is a unique crawler that enables digital marketers to analyse their competitor’s social footprint. It allows you to not only count social shares across an entire site but it also gives you a list of the top most shared authors, the ability to schedule reports and track the changes all within a single dashboard.”
The combination of social elements with the easy accessible site and the opportunity to also easily track competitors makes it a unique tool. On top of that it is the combination between SEO and Social Media, which we love here on State of Search off course, and it is very easy to use.
What are the new features?
The renewed tool has some nice new elements to it. There is obviously the new design, which is much cleaner and much more accessible.
Next to the new design Yousaf made some adjustments and additions to the tool as well. It now for example has authorship detection, which will allow you to see who are the most ‘social’ popular authors on the site. As you can see here, for State of Search that would be… eh me.
This list is based on the popularity of the posts which are written by these authors, which is why Lisa is so high up there, she may not have written too much, what she’s written has been shared a lot.
Another new feature is that you can now do scheduled monitoring, which means that if you set up a campaign you can much easier track it.
Another change is page level metrics, not a small change this. It shows us exactly how specific pages are doing, which off course is incredibly valuable.
Finally Yousaf tells us an API is on the way in the next couple of weeks.
Some nice stats
The first time I saw the tool and got access from Yousaf he gave me and a few others unlimited access. He shouldn’t have done that, because off course we immediately started testing the ‘big sites’ like the BBC and CNN. That off course gave a lot of load to the server, but we did get some interesting information out of it.
This time around Yousaf checked the major Tech sites for us. Now you can see the social results from State of Search above. Those are ‘ok’, we probably can do a lot better, especially if we compare it to the ‘big ones’ in Tech: Next Web, TechCrunch and Econsultancy. They have stunning amounts of social sharing.
What we can note here is that TechCrunch, even though the site has lost a lot of ‘power’ in the industry, still has the most shares by far. Mostly from Twitter, like with the others. This probably has a lot to do with the huge amount of content on the site.
What is also interesting is that where news sites like TechCrunch and the Next Web get a lot out of Twitter and Facebook, a site like e-Consultancy, which focusses a lot more on education, has a lower number on Facebook and a much higher number on a site like Linkedin.
Finally the high number of social shares on Stumbleupon is interesting for TechCrunch. Again, this must have something to do with the huge amount of (older) content on the site.
Conclusion: do competitive analysis
The tool has a lot in it, especially interesting stuff when it comes to competitive analysis. You can analyse how your competitors are doing in the social sphere, which platform is interesting enough and adjust your strategy based on this kind of information.
Well done Yousaf!
Free credits
So would you like to have a play with it? Do it! And Yousaf was kind enough to give anyone who tweets about this post 3000 extra credits!
Tweet the following and Yousaf will grant you the extra credits!
Saw a great tool on StateofSearch I am going to try: Social Crawlytics. And I will get extra credits from @ysekand!
