I’ve been looking for a solid way to connect analytics from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Bitly with Piwik information, and I’m considering writing a plugin for it.
What this would be is to connect to APIs for those four services, pull in data on reach, clicks, retweets, etc. and analyze them for conversation, amplification, applause, and economic value (a la Avinash Kaushik’s suggestions). When I asked True Social Metrics, they said they had no plans to integrate Piwik into their service. It’s a tough pill for me to swallow paying for that service if they don’t support the “economic value” aspect for my setup.
But is this even appropriate to try to incorporate into Piwik, or should it be a separate service (like TSM)? An upside would be a consolidated dashboard, interface, and reporting. On the other hand, all of those services are external and I’m not 100% sure that clicks from those services could be reliably tied to Piwik visitors. (I haven’t dug into the technical details to verify that last one.)
The final thing that trips me up is that social media accounts aren’t a per-website concept. As a game company, we have a company site and sites for different games, but we use our company social media accounts for all of them. That might not be a deal-breaker, but should such a cross-cutting concern be in Piwik?
I think it sounds like a awesome idea, and Piwik would definitely be a great place for it.
Are you familiar with PHP? if so, maybe you would like to try to build such plugin and maybe we could help you if you get blocked…
Right now Piwik tracks “websites” and “mobile apps” but here you want to measure “Social media”. Ideally one would add a “Social presence” entry (instead of adding a new website) in Piwik, and when the “Social presence” measurable is opened in Piwik then one could only show the “Social reports” and not any other related to “websites”. If you have time to work on this and want to build it as open source, let us know and we can maybe help you!
Oh, that’s perfect. That’s exactly the concept I was missing. (I don’t have mobile apps, so I didn’t realize that was a separate kind of entry.)
Getting the time to build it is the difficult part, but I’ll definitely do it open source when I do it. I’ll at least start estimating the level of effort soon.
I’d probably include LinkedIn in addition to my original list, and let other folks contribute code for RenRen and WeChat (neither of which I’ve ever heard of).
