Social Metrics Tracker is a Wordpress plugin for viewing and analyzing the social performance of your site. Out of the box, SharedCount tracks social interactions for all of your posts and pages from a handful of popular networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon. There is no setup required; it just works.

1. Download the development release.
2. From your Dashboard Screen, add and activate the plugin.

That’s it.

... profit!

Social Metrics Tracker stores social metrics in a way that can be accessed by other WP plugins or themes. For example, the social metrics could be used to display a feed of the most popular posts. Metrics are stored as custom post meta fields on each individual post.

To display the total number of social interactions, get the post meta:

<?php echo get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'socialcount_TOTAL', true); ?>

Here is a listing of all of the available data fields which you can access in that way:

There are some Wordpress action hooks which can be used to extend the functionality of this plugin.

social_metrics_post_sync is called when an individual post is being updated, before new data is downloaded. social_metrics_post_sync_complete is called when an individual post is done being updated.

A: Share counts and interactions are gathered from SharedCount.

A: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, and Google+.

A: When activating the plugin, all posts are queued for an update; this takes some time to complete. After that, the data is updated every few hours using the Wordpress Cron system. When a post is visited, if no update has happened recently then that post is placed in queue for an update. When the Wordpress Cron runs, all posts in the queue will be updated. You can configure the TTL (the amount of time to wait between updates) on the options page for the plugin. This method of updating ensures that site visitors do not experience any additional load time due to these data updates.

A: Page views are on the way, okay? You saw that this was a development branch, right?

A: Yes, we used the tears of a baby unicorn forlock. Also, PHP.

A: Please direct your praise and admonishment to Ben Cole, a Chapman University graduate turned staff and web marketing ninja / rockstar / whatever hipster phrase they are throwing around these days.

We wanted to track posts on social networks to see which stories students, alumni, and faculty were most interested in sharing. However, the application is far from limited to higher education. So, we thought, we should share this.

42.

Anyone and everyone is welcome to contribute.