A: A social action can be more broadly defined as a positive engagement shown by a user on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or Pinterest.  As social media networks have given users more options to react to content besides sharing (such 'liking' a piece of content or 'upvoting' something on Reddit), this term is becoming more popular to describe a wider variety of user reactions.

Here's a breakdown of what's counted for each network:

-Facebook: Shares, Likes, Comments
-Twitter: Retweets, Tweets
-Reddit: Upvotes, Comments
-Pinterest: Shares

A: Social share of voice is a competitive benchmark that describes the amount of audience engagement attributed to your brand as a percentage of the total audience engagement across a market or niche. We calculate it within this report by taking the sum of all social actions associated over your brand over the past year and dividing the value by the total number of social actions associated with your website and your competitors' websites.

The concept of using 'Share of Voice' as a method to describe brand's ownership (or lack of ownership) of a particular market is well-established and has been widely used by legacy media companies. Historically, it was calculated by approximating the amount of advertising held by each brand across a different number of channels. The widespread popularity of digital marketing channels - like SEO, PPC, and Social Media - has allowed companies to use large amounts of engagement data to get a more accurate view.

A: Unlike backlinks and social actions, which are relatively known metrics in the content space, 'Evergreen score' is relatively new. Evergreen score is a proprietary, relative ranking score developed by one of our most trusted data providers. It uniquely summarizes the number of social shares and backlinks an article receives 30 days after it is published.

A: When one webpage links to another, a backlink or 'inbound link' is created (source: Moz). This provides users with quick routes to get from one site to another. The more backlinks your content receives from other websites, the easier it will be for users to find your content. A high number of backlinks, especially those from quality sources (like industry publications or organizational websites) can also improve your page's organic search ranking - backlinks are long thought to be an important part of Google's ranking algorithm.

A: The Awareness Score is a proprietary ranking system created by Contently. The Awareness Score summarizes a piece of content's visibility to readers and its overall impact at the top of the funnel by assigning it a score between 1 (poor performance) and 5 (high performance). We created the Awareness Score to bring multiple metrics together so that our customers (and our own marketing team) didn't have to pull multiple reports containing different KPIs in order to understand which pieces of content were working best.

In most instances, the Awareness Score is calculated from the total number of social actions, Evergreen score, and the number of backlinks associated with a piece. In other cases, the Awareness Score is fashioned using a combination of Google Analytics metrics.

A: Though our technology allows us to ingest large amounts of content from millions of pages across the web, there's always a chance something was missed. Here are a few popular reasons why your content piece may have been unable to be crawled:

A: Your own private engagement data - whether it's from Google Analytics, directly from social platforms, or other aggregators - is almost always the most accurate source of information. However, best practices around competitive benchmarking mandate using a common data source across all competitors in order to ensure quality and accuracy. This is why we use high-quality, third-party data providers across all domains inputted - to ensure that no competitor has an unfair advantage.

A: In the Spring of 2018, LinkedIn announced that they were removing the count of shares on pieces of content from their site and deprecating the related API. All members of the larger digital marketing community are eager to learn if LinkedIn will provide access to this valuable data in the future.

Curious to learn more about any of the topics above, or have a question that wasn't included? Get in touch with our team by sending an email to strategy@contently.com.