Terry Smith, Jaxified : Measure the social reach of blogs
Thursday March 10, 2011 , 4 min Read
Jaxified is an analytics tool that helps bloggers measure the social reach of their and blogs in their industry to find breaking stories and key influencers that can help them write better content and build stronger connections. Terry Smith, Cofounder of this Toronto, Canada based startup talks to YourStory about his venture.Introduce yourselves to our readers.
My name is Terry Smith and I am a web developer by day, and an aspiring entrepreneur by night. I have founded two web start-ups previously, one in Silicon Valley, and one in my hometown of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. While they both ultimately failed, I am ready to try again and am excited to do that with Jaxified. Together, with my co-founders, Lee Newton and Joe Taiabjee, we currently make up the Jaxified team.
Tell us about the features of Jaxified
1) Aggregate real-time analytics
Jaxified shows you in real-time who is linking to your blog. For Twitter, we can show you who is linking to you and what influence that link might have based on the number of followers they have. For Facebook, we can show you how many people have shared your content and break it down by Likes, Shares and Comments.
2) Measuring social reach
As I've alluded to, we aim to show you how your content is performing by telling you how many potential eyeballs it will be in front of based on the number of followers of people tweeting about it and some aggregate statistics from Facebook. We call this the social reach, and we show it to you for the blogs you're tracking as a whole and for each individual post over time.
3) Finding viral stories
We aim to show bloggers when their content, or the content their tracking, is going viral. Given our historical data, you can see how posts have performed in the past compared to current content and you can see trends. Right now this is kind of an implied feature of the data, but it's definitely something we want to highlight and help focus on to help bloggers find new content.
There are similar social media dashboards, what makes Jaxified different?
Absolutely, there are services like BackType and PostRank that also offer social media analytics, even tailored to blogs. But no one makes it as easy as us. To set up a blog with us, you just give us the URL, and we automatically find the RSS feed and start tracking new stories and new interactions on those stories on Facebook and Twitter. No meta tags to put on your page or HTML files to create, it's meant to be as painless as possible.
Not by accident, that also means that you can check out the data of other blogs. This is something that is totally unique to us; no one else makes it so easy to check out the social performance of a blog. With the public data we have, we look at tweets, and aggregate public data provided by Facebook to see how the blogs are performing. We also want to help bloggers see which stories are going viral on blogs they're watching, and you can do that as kind of a by-product right now, but we want to hone in on that and help bloggers find trending stories on these specific blogs they've set up.
A lot of people have mentioned that Facebook already offers statistics, but again it's a convenience thing. Our stats are also real-time, and while Facebook is apparently working on a real-time dashboard, we also break it down by post over time; we're specifically tailored to blogs.
Pricing ?
We currently offer two plans: $10 a month for up to 3 blogs and $25 a month for up to 10 blogs. We've tried to separate it out into a plan for individual bloggers and a plan for business. All of our plans some with a 14 day free trial with no payment information or hassle up front.
We're also working on offering a plan for agencies and firms that will allow them to track PR and social campaigns that aren't necessarily tied to blogs. We'll be announcing more information on that in the coming weeks.
Does this tool also provide info on social media campaigns a blog/website could run?
It does not presently, but we are working to add support for monitoring Twitter accounts and Facebook pages tied to your blog. Our firm accounts will also allow for this when they launch.
Do you plan to integrate this with Google analytics ?
We are certainly considering it, but have no concrete plans right now. In true lean start-up mentality, we're laser focused on launching and then listening to our customers to find out what they want next.
