LinkedIn is not the easiest social network to navigate or keep up with. In fact, Chris Brogan deleted his LinkedIn account last year. On the heels of hearing the news, I also expressed frustration about how features were broken and too frustrating to manage.

For example, did you know that if you manage a group, you have to delete items from your Manager’s Choice list if you have over ten announcements in there? Otherwise, it doesn’t work. Luckily I found this out from one of our group moderators, Jim Hodson. Because when I asked the LinkedIn Help Center, they just told me I couldn’t post due to a bug.

Frustrations Of Operating As A Brand & Publisher On LinkedIn

Many brands focus on areas where they can share their content — most have company pages, and many others have groups as well.

The way we post to LinkedIn as a brand is a manual process; we manually publish to our groups, and manually publish to company pages. There once was a feature in the company pages where you could use an RSS feed to publish blog posts, but it has been disabled for some time now.

In terms of tracking, we do track links posted to groups to get a sense of what kind of content resonates with our members. But we don’t track company page links for a few reasons: they have gone through times of stripping parameters, and the shortened links we’ve manually added to updates would not be “live” links. There have been times when the headline link that appears with the thumbnail would go to a dead page.

What we do now is write up a social snippet (sometimes even using the headline), include the link, and let LinkedIn shorten it. At least the link works. Adding tracking and shortening manually is so uncertain that we simply don’t have the time to keep up.

Enter LinkedIn Today

Most publishers have a third branded area on LinkedIn: a “publisher” page that serves as an anchor for external content aggregated by LinkedIn Today. Here is Marketing Land’s page:

To recap how LinkedIn Today works, it is powered by what content is being most heavily shared across the network. This can come from shares via the InShare button on websites, shares from a company page or shares into a group. The “organic popularity” — which is really share volume — is still the biggest driver of content on LinkedIn Today. So, although there is a publisher page that LinkedIn members can “subscribe” to, there really isn’t any control as a brand.

As a result of the recent change, however, you can no longer easily access the LinkedIn Today publisher pages. I checked in with LinkedIn about the change, and they confirmed that they are no longer supporting these publisher pages, but they will be migrating the publisher pages — as well as their followers — to company pages “soon.”

Is LinkedIn About Sharing, Or About Driving Traffic Back To LinkedIn?

With LinkedIn Today and rolling out these upgraded company pages, the network continues to have the potential to drive traffic to sites. But lately, the focus feels a lot more about driving traffic back into LinkedIn rather than about sharing.

With the latest updates you can now browse news articles without leaving your updates stream. You can select LinkedIn Today to see the latest news right on your homepage. The recently rolled out “Channels” — topic areas of curated content written by “Influencers” (over 250 individuals specifically chosen by LinkedIn) — is designed to keep users within the network longer for advertising purposes.

I can see what I’ve shared and commented as an individual on my profile, but I can’t easily see the interactions like I can on Facebook, Google+ or even on Twitter. When I first joined LinkedIn, it was about managing my professional contacts and network. I made a firm decision years ago that this was the only place to connect with people I have worked with or have met in a professional setting. Yet, LinkedIn has prioritized the mad dash for ad revenue, instead of taking care of its core product — the professional network.

Admittedly, in the past year, LinkedIn has implemented a number of useful social updates such as new mobile apps and allowing @ mentions in updates; but, there are times when the fundamental functionality of the platform just does not work — and I mean technically operate properly. If you are marketing on LinkedIn, it’s something to keep an eye on. LinkedIn has never been the easiest platform to navigate as a brand nor as a publisher. It will be interesting to see what their plans are in terms of LinkedIn Today and company pages in general.

If you spend any time on Pinterest, you’ll know that clicking on a pin only brings you to an image, and as a user, you need to click twice in order to get to the original source. Here at Marketing Land, we’ve been doing some Pinterest testing over the last few weeks, trying out different ways to include URLs in the caption that appears with the pinned image in order to make it easier to get to the original story. We’ve tested using a branded shortened URL (we track all of our social links), as well as using the original long URL.

However, when clicking on the shortened URL, we discovered Pinterest sends the user to an intermediate page that states, “Suspicious Link: This link redirects to another site, it may link to spam or other inappropriate content.”

On the other hand, posts that did not use a shortened URL linked just fine.

Custom shortened URLs provide tracking, and also look a lot nicer. But according to Pinterest’s Help area, no shorteners or redirects are allowed, including bitly links.

We reached out to Barry Schnitt, Head of Communications and Public Policy at Pinterest and asked why short links incurred a warning. His response:

“1. We want to be able to show users where a pin leads. Unfortunately,
 bit.ly/xyz doesn’t tell them much.

2. We want to be able to offer users more relevant content from a site (and more distribution for the site) by suggesting other pins from a site. Again, we can do that for marketingland.com but not for bit.ly.


3. Unfortunately, we’ve found that bad guys out there abuse redirects and URL shorteners to send people to malicious sites.”

This makes a lot of sense, but there are other sites using shortened URLs, such as cnet.co and abcn.ws.

Schnitt confirmed that websites that have a branded shortened URL which points to their domain (such as mklnd.com for marketingland.com) can, in fact, submit a request to Pinterest Support to be “whitelisted.” We have submitted our request and are waiting to be confirmed.

Whether adding a link to Pinterest posts increases traffic is still to be determined, but if we can directly link to the source in the caption, it makes a lot of sense from a user’s perspective. We’ll have a better idea once we can track the activity.

Posted Links Pointing To Error Pages

The first problem we encountered a few weeks ago was that links posted to our company page were all pointing to error pages. We created a workaround by adding the link in the headline; however, it’s discouraging to not have your company profile page work properly.

According to LinkedIn, this issue should be resolved by this coming Monday, and all new links as well as previous links should be back to normal.

LinkedIn Members Not Seeing Company Updates In Their Streams

The second issue discovered is the decrease in impressions of company pages in LinkedIn members’ streams. We’ve noticed that we weren’t receiving the regular exposure that we normally do. Yesterday, we received a formal notice from LinkedIn that some company updates are, in fact, getting fewer impressions than usual, and that “the engineering team is diligently working on this problem.” Here is the notice I received as admin of the Marketing Land and Search Engine Land company pages:

LinkedIn confirmed that this lack of visibility issue is unrelated to the “dead links” bug outlined above, and that they are “actively working to resolve this and will let page administrators know as soon as it’s been resolved.” No timeline has been given for the fix.

So, if you have a LinkedIn company page and post regularly, you may want to check out if it’s working properly.

Postscript: LinkedIn has emailed some company managers about the issue of company updates not appearing in streams:

We’ve resolved a technical issue that temporarily caused a drop in company update impressions. All members are now seeing all of the updates from companies they follow in their update stream, and impressions for company updates have returned to normal levels.   Thank you so much for your patience while we fixed this issue and for using LinkedIn Company Pages!   Sincerely, The LinkedIn Company Pages Team

The New Google Analytics Report tool automatically delivers an infographic depicting your favorite metrics right to your desktop. Below is a sample of a full infographic that is generated.

To be clear, this report isn’t meant to replace regular analytics dashboards, nor does it report beyond page views, visitors, time on site, organic traffic and social traffic. You also may be tracking your social traffic using campaign tagging, in which it would not appear as social referral traffic in this report. However, it does provide an appealing representation of website activity on a weekly basis, without needing to log into Google Analytics.

How would you use a report like this? Share your ideas in the comment below.

Yesterday, it was Burger King. Earlier today it was Jeep. And now it’s MTV. It’s a brand marketer’s nightmare — getting your Twitter account hacked.

About a half hour ago, the MTV account tweeted “MMM. THIS BURGER TASTES GOOD!!!!!!!!!! #MTVHACK.” MTV is the third major brand account that has been hijacked this week.

The account was temporarily branded as the BET Experience, a live music event in Los Angeles. It’s not confirmed if promoters of the event hacked the account. Sine then, the MTV Twitter seems to have been frozen, and the BET Experience branding removed.

Earlier today, the official Twitter Jeep account was taken over with messages that it was sold to Cadillac, and that Jeep employees used drugs. Coincidentally, Jeep’s hacked tweets included the #OpMadCow hashtag, the same used yesterday when the Internet group Anonymous took over Burger King’s Twitter account. Jeep has since deleted all the tweets, and didn’t acknowledge the hacking publicly on Twitter.

Postscript: We fell for it. Well played MTV and BET, well played. You just gave “twitterjack” a whole new meaning.

This morning while reviewing our social channels, we noticed a 384,000 drop in Search Engine Land’s +1 numbers that appear below the logo. Yesterday, it was over 409,000 – today only 25,000. Luckily, the number of people and pages who have you in circles, a little lower on the right side of your profile, is still at 366,000. However, 25,000 plus 366,000 still don’t add up to 409,000. So, what’s going on?

We checked with our contact at Google, who confirmed that this is a known issue, and there is something going on with the way the numbers are counted and combined, and it should be resolved soon. Unfortunately, as of November 2012, we can no longer see +1 metrics in Webmaster Tools, so we have to sit tight and see if the numbers bounce back.

In the past hour, the Marketing Land Google+ page has been affected, decreasing from over 14,000 to 2,874.

Have you seen fluctuations on the brand pages you manage?

UPDATE 1:58 PM EST: +1 metrics to brand pages seem to have returned to normal for many, it seems that the glitch was short-lived.

On occasion, that toolset grows: Google Webmaster Tools, Simply Measured, PageLever, Followerwonk, Raven Tools, Curalate, Twitter Analytics, bitly, Muckrack, Tweetreach, Google Insights, Statigram, IFTTT… and there are more if I count the tools I use on a personal basis. I haven’t used Union metrics for Tumblr yet (frankly I am sitting on my hands until something cheaper comes out), and just today our Founding Editor Danny Sullivan introduced me to another potential tool, Crowdbooster (see this week’s Link Week column from Julie Joyce for more about that).

Many of these tools listen, track performance, provide competitive data, even make recommendations. They are all unique – although they may be working with the same datasets, or use the same APIs, they each provide something useful. Yet despite all of this data and opportunity, aggregating and understanding how our content is being shared across the most popular social channels simply just seems daunting.

Fortunately, while during our end-of-the-year posts, I had the opportunity to dig into Social Crawlytics, a social analysis tool that crawls sites and generates a report that shows how often each URL was shared on different social platforms.

There’s no easy way to run a report like this in Google Analytics (that I know of anyway), and looking at individual URL metrics within social platforms is not efficient. I had the chance to talk to Yousaf Sekander from RocketMill, who created the tool, and asked him a few questions on how the tool works.

Getting Started

Social Crawlytics is free when you first start using it. Once you sign up, you’ll notice you’ll have 5,000 credits. Each credit is for one page on a domain, so you’ll be able to crawl and analyze 5,000 pages right away. You can donate to get more pages, or you may consider signing up for the enterprise level program, depending on what’s best for you.

Be warned: it can take anywhere between 1-6 hours to crawl 5,000 pages, so be prepared to build in some time to generate your reports.

Scheduling Reports

When you are setting up the domain you want to crawl, you have the option to schedule a report. You can choose to skip this step, but if you prefer to monitor a domain regularly, scheduling a report is a good option.

Yousef recommended that a sites like Search Engine Land or Marketing Land that generate a lot daily content and social activity should be scheduled at least twice a month in order to get a historical snapshot of shares for each URL. Of course, each time a you run a report for a site with thousands of pages you’ll use up your credits rather quickly, so use your best judgement.

Notifications

The last step in generating a report is simply filling out the notification form, this will let you know when the crawl is complete and the data is ready to be viewed. This is important: you don’t want to download data that’s incomplete.

Social Shares Reports

Under “Reports” in the left navigation you will see the domain for reports generated – the most recent report will be listed at the bottom. Yousef mentioned that he is still tweaking with the reports, and plans on adding dates to these soon. If you are regularly monitoring a domain and have a report scheduled, it creates a new report each time the crawler runs. All metrics are cumulative, so the most recent report will show the total shares generated at that time.

Below is the last report we ran for Marketing Land, you can see right away that our posts are monthly shared on Twitter, Followed by LinkedIn.

You can also see the most popular authors based on social stats alone. the colored graph are the Page Shares Per Network, where Social Crawlytics takes the top 50 shared pages, and brakes them down by network. Each color block represents a URL; for example, a recent post called Content Marketing for People Who Hate Writing took off on StumbleUpon. That same shade of yellow is represents the same URL in the rest of the graph.

One of the most useful aspects of the tool, however, is the .csv export. Although you can see page-level results within the dashboard, exporting the data as a spreadsheet allows you to customize results and sort by the number of shares that occurred on a specific social channel: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google+ and Pinterest.

You can also sort by the total number of shares a specific URL received. The tool also goes one step further by including the anchor text pointing to the URL, and the header status code for that page.

Final Thoughts

I asked Yousef his motivation behind building such a great tool:

“Creating compelling content is not cheap nor is it easy, it is imperative to carry out research to find out what type of content has worked for your competitors. I created Social Crawlytics because there was nothing out there that could allow me to carry out this type of research, particularly for large websites.”

Yousef also repeatedly mentioned that Social Crawlytics is a free service, and he does not have any commercial motives at this time. “It is a tool made out of love and passion,”  he said, “I am footing the server bills myself… I don’t ask for money but if a user thinks the service is worthy or useful they can choose to donate.”

Personally, with the countless tools I use regularly,  I can attest that this tool fulfills a professional need, not just for social media marketers and community managers, but for any business who markets online and relies on site traffic and visibility. And not just for internal business reasons, but for competitive analyses as well.

How will you use a tool like this? Share your ideas in the comments below.

Unlike the top stories shared on Google+ – where our audience clearly preferred Google-related stories – Facebook sharers preferred different kinds of marketing articles, including content marketing, Facebook marketing, using Twitter and other social media posts. Anecdotally, Facebook posts do well on Facebook, and Google-related posts are popular on Google+. Facebook popularity also depend on other factors such as whether the social post incorporated an image or video, when it was posted, and how long the post is. As we all know, understanding social sharing is a moving target – Facebook’s Timeline for brands launched in February 2012, promoted posts were introduced in May, all while many marketers have been trying to decipher the recent decrease on Facebook reach. It will be interesting to see how Facebook evolves in 2013.

Here are the 20 most-shared stories of 2012:

1. Once Deemed Evil, Google Now Embraces “Paid Inclusion” (80 )

2. Microsoft To Make Same Privacy Change Google Was Attacked For; No One Seems To Care (78)

3. Dark Google: One Year Since Search Terms Went “Not Provided” (73)

4. How Google Went From Search Engine To Content Destination (71)

5. Brands Rejoice! Page Notifications Will Help Increase Facebook Reach (70)

6. Step-By-Step: How To Download All Your Tweets With The New Twitter Archive Service (63)

7. Facebook’s “Suggested Post” Ad Helps Push Page Content, No Connection Required (62)

8. Microsoft Slams Google Privacy Changes With “Putting People First” Ad Campaign (61 )

9. The Return Of The Google Dance (60)

10. Content Marketing For People Who Hate Writing (52)

11. Google’s New Terms Of Service & Privacy Policy: Anything You Do May Be Used To Target You? (52)

12. Studies: As Mobile Email Usage Soars, Marketers Budget More For Email, Mobile And Social (48)

13. ‘PageLever Now’ Launches Real-time Facebook Post Analytics & Management Tool (46)

14. Santa Tracking Explained: Why NORAD & Google Show Different Locations & Gifts Delivered (45)

15. Study: iPad Controls 98 Percent Of Tablet Web Traffic (44)

16. How Facebook Tagging Helped Make Randi Zuckerberg’s “Private” Photo Go Public (41)

17. TIME Names Google Glass A ‘Best Invention Of 2012′ (39)

18. Pinterest Grows Up & Goes Corporate With New Tools (And TOS) For Businesses (38)

19. 2012 Social Media Report: Users Spending 58% More Time On Social Media, Social App Usage More Than Doubles (38)

20. 30 Essential Business Apps For Your Smartphone (36)

Thanks to Social Crawlytics to help us generate this data. The tool only tracks Facebook shares, so this list does not incorporate stories with the most Facebook likes or comments posted.

1. How Google Went From Search Engine To Content Destination (735 tweets)

2. Twitter Quietly Launches A User Directory (670 tweets)

3. Once Deemed Evil, Google Now Embraces “Paid Inclusion” (578 tweets)

4. Infographic: iPhone Beats Outlook As Top Email Client, As Mobile Overtakes Desktop (546 tweets)

5. Step-By-Step: How To Download All Your Tweets With The New Twitter Archive Service (516 tweets)

6. Dark Google: One Year Since Search Terms Went “Not Provided” (487 tweets)

7. Content Marketing For People Who Hate Writing (432 tweets)

8. The Return Of The Google Dance (349 tweets)

9. Nielsen: Facebook Users Spending 30 Minutes Less There Now Than 6 Months Ago (329 tweets)

10. Google Analytics In-Page Analytics Gets Link Attribution Reporting (328 tweets)

11. 9 Social Media Elements Worth Personalizing (326 tweets)

12. 8 Storytelling Tips To Enhance Your Content Marketing (322 tweets)

13. 30 Essential Business Apps For Your Smartphone (310 tweets)

14. Pinterest Grows Up & Goes Corporate With New Tools (And TOS) For Businesses (290 tweets)

15. ROI: The Most Dysfunctional Metric In Digital Marketing (283 tweets)

16. 5 Things Likely To Shape Social In 2013 (276 tweets)

17. 5 Free WordPress Plugins For Affiliate Marketers (276 tweets)

18. A Look At The Dark Side Of Twitter Popularity: The Paid Follower Economy (274 tweets)

19. Google Results Position: How Much Is First Place Really Worth? (265 tweets)

20. Google Providing Authorship Analytics To Google+ Users (264 tweets)

The data was gathered by Social Crawlytics, a social analytics tool that crawls and provides social activity for each URL on a website.

Make sure to check back tomorrow, when we will publish the most liked stories from Facebook. Until then, we hope your 2013 has kicked off to a roaring start!

To gather the data we used Social Crawlytics, a free tool that crawls any site analyzes each URL to show how it’s been shared on the most popular social channels out there, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and more. According to Yousaf Sekander from Social Analytics, the data comes directly from each network’s API which means the data is platform agnostic. In other words, whatever data the social network has on your site, it is captured right from the social channel.

A few things we noticed about these top headlines:

• Not surprisingly, Google authorship and content is popular on Google+
• Project Glass was a highlight this year, not just a breakthrough invention, but also in terms of marketing online and offline
• Our Google+ audience is paying attention to ongoing privacy changes

So let’s get started! Here are our top stories with the most +1′s from 2012, with the number of +1′s each received shown after the headline:

1. Microsoft To Make Same Privacy Change Google Was Attacked For; No One Seems To Care (203)

2. How Google Went From Search Engine To Content Destination (175)

3. Google Providing Authorship Analytics To Google+ Users (121)

4. How Facebook Tagging Helped Make Randi Zuckerberg’s “Private” Photo Go Public (120)

5. Thanks To Project Glass, Google Is Most Shared Video Brand Of 2012 [Report] (119)

6. Google Glass Meets Fashion, Smart Glasses Part Of DVF Fashion Show (109)

7. Once Deemed Evil, Google Now Embraces “Paid Inclusion” (107 )

8. TIME Names Google Glass A ‘Best Invention Of 2012′ (101)

9. Should Google+ Communities Be Part Of Your Social Media Strategy? (99)

10. The Return Of The Google Dance (97)

11. Vic Gundotra: Google+ Doesn’t Intrude On Social With Ads, Piss Off Developers By Changing APIs (95)

12. Dark Google: One Year Since Search Terms Went “Not Provided” (82)

13. Microsoft Slams Google Privacy Changes With “Putting People First” Ad Campaign (78)

14. Step-By-Step: How To Download All Your Tweets With The New Twitter Archive Service (75)

15. Google+ Hits 135 Million “In Stream” Users: The Growth Chart & Behind The Numbers (74)

16. Santa Tracking Explained: Why NORAD & Google Show Different Locations & Gifts Delivered (70)

17. No, You Don’t Need To Fear The Google Privacy Changes: A Reality Check (62)

18. Facebook Tests Pay-For-Delivery Messaging; Brands May Get Access Later (59)

19. Google’s “AR” Game Ingress Offers A Glimpse Of The Future (58)

20. Google’s New Terms Of Service & Privacy Policy: Anything You Do May Be Used To Target You? (57)

A special thanks Annie Cushing, who told us about the tool.