Tuesdays With Topher: Finding Your Reach

Hi there! Topher here for another installment of Tuesdays With Topher!

Are your ears burning?  Or does your nose itch?

Honestly, I don’t really know what the expression is for when someone is talking about you, but I do know that as a blogger, you hope and pray that A LOT of people are out there talking about you!

But how do you know?

Of course, you have Jet Pack or Google Analytics that will give you a really nice idea of what’s happening on your site, but what about elsewhere in the internet atmosphere? How can you gauge your reach?

Below, I’ll offer a few tips to help you see which social media outlet is helping you the most, and show you how you can help keep your finger on the internet’s pulse when it comes to your brand.

Buzzsumo

I found this site a little while ago, and I love checking-in once a month or so.

Buzzsumo, somehow, looks across some major social media networks and calculates which posts are your highest performers.

It’s also a helpful tool to see which social network is helping you the most (because that might be where you want to spend your resources).

It might also show you if you have under-performing posts, so you can Tweet it up a little more or consider a Pinning service to help spread the word.

WhoTalking

WhoTalking is an interesting little site. It goes a step further than Buzzsumo and shows specific entries from Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Picasa, Digg, and others.

But not Facebook. Because Facebook sucks. They have decided not to play well with businesses and continue to be horribly uncooperative…  Because they suck.  (Sorry about that…  Just my Tourette’s flaring up a bit.)

So … WhoTalking.

Once you type in your domain (or your screen name), work your way through the various buttons that show up below the trending topics and see what people are saying about you.

It might surprise you how much love you’re getting.

Pinterest Source

This one is pretty straight forward, and you probably already check it, but Pinterest makes it super simple to see who’s giving you Pinterest love.

All you need to do is type the following in the address bar of your favorite browser:
http://www.pinterest.com/source/domainname.com
(ours looks like:
http://www.pinterest.com/source/restorationredoux.com)

This little trick returns Pins that link back to whatever domain you enter in the “domainname” space above.

It’s nice to scan through there to see who’s repinning and which items/boards are yielding the best results.

Google Alerts

I’m a Google Alerts junkie. Honestly, though.

I friggin’ love them!

Why? I’m glad you asked!

Here’s what you do:

• Go to Google Alerts,
• Type in your search,
• Save it

Whenever a website updates a page that contains that text, you should get an alert emailed to you.

It’s that simple!!  And the sky is the limit for what you want alerts about:  local sports teams, politicians, competitors, people you’re stalking, whatever!

Google Search

Here’s another thing I like to do. It’s a Google search, but we’re adding a few tweaks.

For this, we’re using three search tricks to get a little better results than what we otherwise might.

• First, we’re going to put quotation marks around the site name that we’re searching. That tells Google to search EXACTLY that term.
• Second, we’re going to use the SITE: function to highlight just that domain.
• Third, we’re going to add the minus sign in front of the SITE: qualifier because we want to exclude hits from my domain.

So it’s going to look like this:

“Restoration Redoux” -SITE:restorationredoux.com

What this is going to do is fetch a crapton of search results that contain the words “Restoration Redoux” (exactly as it’s typed), but it’s going to exclude restorationredoux.com from the findings (because I don’t need to know wherever Shanna or I talk about this site).

This is a great tool to see who’s giving you love … but it might also reveal some interesting hits from sites you’ll be surprised by — this is a good way of seeing if anyone may be skimming your posts and trying to pass it off as their own.

This is also a handy tool if you want to search for something ONLY within a website — by not including the minus sign you can use the SITE: function to search dressers on our site by searching:  dressers SITE:restorationredoux.com. That will return all the pages we have that contain the word dresser, but only within our domain.

Check it out.

Google Image Search

This is something I can fiddle with for hours!

If you go to Google Image Search, in the search bar along the far right side, there’s a little camera.

If you click that camera, you can link to or upload an image.

What’s fun to do here is to see what happens when you upload/link to images from your most popular projects.

Sure, it’ll come back with a lot of items that are similar, but not yours … but it’ll probably find some matches too.

Scroll through the pages and see what comes back.

Sort of interesting.

 

Well that’s all for today. I know there are a ton of other tools out there, and if you’re willing, please share below in the comments.

Thanks so much!  And don’t forget to check out my other posts below!