Resource Of The Week: PostRank

Today's resource of the week is PostRank. Another hat-tip to Jane Friedman for mentioning this tool in her blog post, 2 Tricks to Keep Your Online Reading Manageable. PostRank is a way to measure how socially engaging content like RSS feeds and blog posts are. It was recently acquired by Google and is a great tool to help you see what content might be worth spending your time reading as you sift through the mountain of data available to you.



While the applications of this tool are continuing to grow, there are two ways you can use it today to help you prioritize which content you read. First, you can incorporate PostRank into Google Reader to see which posts receive the most social engagement. If you click on the screen shot at the top of this post, you can see how the PostRank scores can help you see which posts you might want to pay special attention to reading.



A second way you can use PostRank is by adding a widget to your blog. This will display the posts on your site with the highest PostRank scores and allow your visitors to search your blog and pull up search results and the PostRank associated with each post. Click on this screenshot to see the widget on my blog, or visit my blog and scroll down to the widget found on the right sidebar to see it live.





PostRank tracks a number of interactions with your post to determine the scores including comments, tweets, other social media mentions, clicks and posts that have been created in response to other posts. Taking all of these items into consideration will give you a broad-based view of how engaging your posts are in a way that goes beyond simple analytics. In fact, it will give you a whole new way to see how people interact with your posts.



As I said, this just is part of how you can use PostRank. For more information on this tool, and to see how to implement it into your site and your Google Reader, please visit their site.













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Tony Eldridge is the author of The Samson Effect , an action/adventure novel that Clive Cussler calls a "first rate thriller brimming with intrigue and adventure." He is also the author of the Twitter marketing book, Conducting Effective Twitter Contests . His new novel, The Lottery Ticket , was just recently released on Kindle.