Our recently launched Chrome extension already has many fans amongst our customers. When you add it to your browser, you can see at a glance a detailed breakdown of all the social media engagement any article has generated.
Some use it to check how well their own story is doing. Others use the extension to keep an eye on competition or simply to see how fast a news article they are reading is picking up engagement.
There are three levels of data that the EzyInsights Chrome extension shows.
Top Level
These are your headline stats, the most important figures ‘at a glance’.
Engagement – this figure shows the total number of all engagements (likes, reactions, comments, favourites, and shares) across all the social media networks we currently track – Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Speed – showing how many engagements this article is picking up right now, measured in the number of engagements per minute (eng/min). This number varies a lot: from single digits to over 1000/min for the biggest publishers and viral stories.
Remember that this metric is calculated in real-time, so if an article was viral a week ago, the speed metric might not be particularly high right now since fewer people are engaging with it.
The example here comes from a science article about ExoMars spacecraft published by the New York Times. While the NYT is a big publisher, this particular story is aimed at a niche audience of space enthusiasts – which is why the engagement and speed metrics are what they are. If you look at the NYT’s front page articles, the figures are bound to be many times more than what we see here.
Mid-level
Here you get web shares.
This section shows the number of web shares an article got on each social network we track.
Web shares refer to the number of times this article’s URL has been shared by anyone to each social network.
The majority of web shares come directly from the publisher’s website, when someone clicks on the social sharing buttons next to the article, as highlighted below.
Bottom level
Zoom in on each Facebook post.
This bottom level of metrics taps into Facebook’s data to show which pages have shared this article. We also see how many times it’s been shared on the same page, and how many reactions, comments, and shares each Facebook post linking to this article received.
In the Chrome extension, you can click on each of the posts to take a closer look.
Since most publishers have multiple Facebook pages, it’s a good idea to share the article across different pages to maximize reach. In this case, the NYT shared the article on their Science page as well as on their main Facebook page for The New York Times:
It can also make sense to re-share the same article several times on the same page over a certain time period, perhaps with slightly different angles. In this example, the NYT shared the post three times on their own Facebook page, a few hours apart, focusing on a slightly different aspect of the story each time:
The simplicity of Chrome extension is its main goal – offering data instantly at the click of a button. You can also use it to understand publishing strategies of different titles, not only in terms of posting frequency but also to see what is really working on Facebook.
Remember that you need to be logged in to your EzyInsights account to be able to use the Chrome extension. As soon as you add it to your browser – you’re good to go! There’s no limit on the number of links you can check.