PostRank Connect

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I learned about PostRank Connect at the recent Monitoring Social Media conference in Boston and decided to give it a try as it meets my key criteria:

It promises to provide me with insights about my content through the PostRank Analytics application (free, for now, when you sign-up for PostRank Connect).
It promises to connect me with brands that could lead to mutually beneficial relationships.
It is FREE.

How do you sign up?

Navigate to the sign-up page and enter standard information like your username, password, and location. Now identify your content sources, your blogs and your social media accounts. Important points:

It is critical that you identify the attributes of your blogs as you set them up, making it easier to do the matching of brands and influencers.
When you identify your blog you must also prove ownership, like you do with Google Analytics and other similar tools, by either adding a page, an image, or making a networking change through DNS.
When you add a new contact source you can link it to a Twitter account. Ideally you should also be able to tie in Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and any number of other accounts as well.
To achieve the best results you should use Google Analytics to your site. This will enable you to see how engagement and traffic tie together.

Alright, what else?

Well, return to business as usual for a couple of days, running any planned campaigns or just letting the sites run as you normally do. After a few days log back in, select the My Sites tab and then click upon the View Analytics button. I set this up for a brand new community that I am very slowly tweaking and very slowly rolling out. When I view analytics for this site I see the following:

You can view, side by side, the page view information and the social engagement information associated with this site. If you scroll beneath this first chart you will also see all Facebook status updates and Twitter messages that are related to content or pages you are tracking for this site. By default all blog posts (tracked via RSS feed) are tracked. Other content must be added manually as part of the setup process.

Deeper analysis?

You can click upon the Analyze menu to download a CSV file which I am, at this point, unimpressed with. You are not given the option to choose a date range or fields to include in the CSV file and the data, at least for my test site,was not useful. I am looking for, and hoping to see, PostRank put a lot more into the reporting for this solution. This offering is not significantly more powerful than Google Analytics alone.

My verdict?

The product is easy to set up and requires a minimal effort to interact with. If you are already making use of Google Analytics and investing in Twitter and Facebook than you should give this product a try. If you are not using Analytics, however, I would not both using this product.

John