Social Sleuthing: Who is Sharing Your Content: Twitter & LinkedIn Edition

shadow detective servicesHave you ever wondered who is sharing your blog posts or other content on social media sites but don’t have access to expensive social media monitoring applications that can tell you? Here are ways you can find out who is sharing your content, and in some cases how much traffic each share is driving, on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Some of the approaches here use Google Analytics or WordPress statistics, the measurement solutions I use here on B2B Digital Marketing.

Who is Sharing Your Content on Twitter

Because almost all tweets are public, Twitter is the easiest platform to discover who is sharing your content. The biggest limitation with Twitter is tweets are searchable for less than a week.

Finding Tweets using the Tweet Button
If your page has a Tweet button with a counter, just click the counter to search Twitter for shares of that piece of content. It really is that easy, but it requires searching for each page, one at a time.

Finding Tweets using Twitter Search
For a small site or blog, the better solution is to search for your domain using Twitter Search. This will show all shares of your content on Twitter, across all of your pages.

As the image below shows, many of these shares do not include my Twitter handle (@wittlake) and would not appear in my mentions on Twitter.

Searching Twitter for Your Content: Results

Going Back More than Four Days on Twitter
Topsy lets you see who shared your content months ago. To see tweets that include links to a particular page on Topsy, the URL is http://topsy.com/ + “Your Page URL” (without the + or quotes).

Topsy Example
My post on G+ and SEO is more than a month old. Today, searching for the post on Twitter only returns one tweet. Using Topsy, you can see 160 tweets of the post here (you can see how the URL is built as well): http://topsy.com/b2bdigital.net/2012/01/19/google-for-seo-dont-focus-on-your-brand-page/.

How Much Traffic Does Each Twitter Share Drive

Since Twitter begin using t.co as a link shortener on all links, you can easily see how much traffic any individual tweet drove. In Google Analytics, go Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals and select “t.co” from the list of sources. You will get a report of visits from each t.co-shortened URL.

Traffic from t.co Links

By searching for the t.co-shortened URL, you often can find who shared the link. Using Google and focusing on results from Topsy and Imagist, I quickly found that four of the five URLs above represent traffic from Rand Fishkin’s, Jay Baer’s, Mark Schaefer’s and Albert Ribera’s tweets.

Who is Sharing Your Content on LinkedIn

LinkedIn content shares are not as open as Twitter, so searching on LinkedIn is more limited. However, it is possible to find LinkedIn shares through a combination of LinkedIn Signal and WordPress Site Stats.

Finding Shares Using LinkedIn Signal
You can quickly find public shares of your content using LinkedIn Signal. Go to News > Signal in the main LinkedIn navigation bar and type a few words from the title of your content. You should see your content show up in the right sidebar under trending links, where my Pinterest post is in image below.

See Who Shared Your Content on LinkedIn

Click the number of shares displayed on your content under trending links and you will get a listing of everyone that publicly shared your content on LinkedIn.

Finding LinkedIn Shares Using WordPress Site Stats
Using WordPress’s Site Stats (part of WordPress’s Jetpack plugin for WordPress.org), the referring URLs include a significant amount of detail that can be used to find not only individuals, but shares through groups and key traffic drivers.

Here is a snapshot from my Site Stats report, with LinkedIn traffic expanded.

LinkedIn Traffic in WordPress Site Stats

The first share listed drove 10 visits on its own, and clicking that link I see my page with the LinkedIn share bar, showing who shared my page (Jeff Rozner) and in this case the group he shared it in.

LinkedIn Share Bar

In addition, by searching for Jeff’s member ID, highlighted in the site stats screenshot above, you can see he actually drove 15 visits. I don’t know Jeff, but after this I just might reach out to him.

Your Turn

What tricks do you use to find who is sharing your content on Twitter and LinkedIn, or on other networks? Share your tricks in the comments below or with me on Twitter (@wittlake).

A future post will outline how to find who is sharing your information on Google+, Pinterest and Facebook.

Get every post delivered directly to your inbox.

Your email address will not be shared or sold. I hate spam too.