Our goal at Argyle is to make your social media marketing as seamless and powerful as possible, and with these three new updates, we’re doing just that.

New and Improved Post Report—Now with Facebook Insights!

Data-driven marketers are gleaning information from Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and their trusty Argyle Social reports. We’ve cut out one more step for you by pulling Facebook Insights into Argyle. Now, you can see the reach, viral impressions, people talking about this, as well as like and comments per post. Check out the screen shots below to see the beautiful rendering of Insights data in a clean, pretty Argyle fashion.

Want to know what posts are generating the most buzz on Twitter? The new post report also will help you there, too. It shows interaction metrics for all Twitter posts so you can easily see what posts generated the most conversation. It also presents that conversation history to you in-line so that you can see exactly what responses a particular post generated.

Track Your Social Shares

Social media marketers are forever chasing the answer to the eternal question “How is social moving the needle for my business?”. Argyle Social now helps you answer that question even better with our new social shares feature.

There are two primary types of social activity: things you post, and things other people post about you. Argyle has always done a great job tracking the performance and the impact of things you post. But we’re now also tracking things that other people post about you via the share buttons on your website and blog.

This will give marketers a more holistic view of the value that social media is creating. Every link shared via an Argyle share button will track a share count, as well as the number of clicks and conversions that these shares have generated.

Do you know how much value your advocates are creating for you?

Google+ Integration

In your engage tab, along with keeping up with all the latest conversations about your brand, search terms, and competitors, you can now import the news feed from Google Plus pages. Whether you’re a full G+ convert, slowly trying it out, or just getting started, this new integration will make sure you’re keeping up with chatter on G+.

Starting today, real-time insights will include Likes, People Talking About This, and all post metrics. These insights will be updated every 5 to 10 minutes, which is a significant improvement over the previous lagging insights many brands lamented.

Previously, many people had noticed insights delayed an average of 48 hours, spurring the creation of http://whyisfacebookinsightsnotworking.com/ by PageLever co-founders Jeff Widman and David Turner. Though real-time insights’ imminent release was announced in February, it’s now a reality.

Real-time data empowers brands to track content on a minute-by-minute basis. Why can that be powerful? Here are a few reasons we can think of:

1. The feedback loop is finally in real-time. These enhanced metrics will allow brands to be more nimble, change direction if needed, and ride organic waves of popularity before they end.
2. By tracking PTAT, brands can see what content has virality and shareability and replicate it. This will help brands more fully understand the oft-confused new metric, and in doing so, find more ways to optimize content.
3. The frame of reference for campaigns has just become much narrower. Rather than declaring “We received 290 Likes in 1 day”, marketers can now pinpoint the exact growth and decline of posts by the minute. That impressive campaign is even more so if 1 day shrinks to 13 hours!

We’ll go into more detail about what this means, how you can measure your impact in real-time, and more during next Tuesday’s Facebook Insights 201 webinar with Jeff Widman. Join us.

Experian just published The 2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report. The original report is 153 pages and chock full of insightful data about email, mobile, social, and search marketing. It’s definitely worth a read. My favorite section surfaces some fascinating insights on the performance of social visitors to corporate websites.

It turns out that social visitors to your company’s website are, on average, much more engaged than the average visitor. In particular, paid marketing on Facebook shows some truly off-the-charts conversion rates.

Let me just say: wow. Something is clearly working. In the world of email and PPC campaigns, conversion rates of 10-20% are generally considered pretty good. These conversion rates, hovering around 50%, are nigh or unheard of. Whether this is because of social proof points displayed along with Facebook ads, extreme demographic targeting capabilities, or some other Facebook magic conversion/fairy dust, the results speak for themselves.

These results seem to validate Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s claim that, “68 percent more people are likely to remember seeing the ad with their friend’s name … [and they are] 300 percent more likely to purchase.” It’s no wonder Sandberg describes Facebook’s ad targeting as “the elusive goal we’ve been searching for, for a long time; making your customers your marketers.”

Another set of fun facts from the report was a behavioral breakdown of consumers based on social media activity. It turns out that…

• People who use social media in general are more likely than the average online adult to: fly Virgin Atlantic airlines, eat at Chipotle, shop at Payless Shoe Source, snack on Terra Chips, own an iPhone, visit Starbucks, and drive a Saab.
• Those who visit professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, are more likely to: fly United Airlines, eat at The Cheesecake Factory, shop at Nordstrom, own an iPhone, stay at Hilton hotels, and shop at Whole Foods.
• Those who visit photo sharing sites are more likely than the average online adult to: shop at Whole Foods, use Burt’s Bees, shop at Payless Shoe Source, buy Huggies, shop at Forever 21, and shop at Hobby Lobby stores.
• Those who visit video sharing site are more likely than the average to: eat at Long John Silver’s, drink Capri Sun, wear Puma sneakers, shop at Family Dollar Store, use AT&T, and use Downy sheets.

Do any of these findings surprise you?

Everyone agrees — social commerce is the next big ecommerce revolution. But it’s certainly not happening overnight. Check out our infographic, below, to see how retailers and customers are adapting to the changing landscape. As always, feel free to embed on your own site. :)

How do you think this might change in the next six months? Let us know in the comments.

The latest episode of the Social Pros Podcast drops today, featuring Justin Levy from Citrix, our bespectacled leader Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, and yours truly from everyone’s favorite data-driven social media marketing software provider.

For this week’s Social Media Stat of the Week, we discussed the findings from a recent social commerce study commissioned by Digitas, executed by Harris Interactive.

Social commerce appears to be the next great Internet gold rush – Booz & Co estimates that social commerce will grow to a $30B global industry over the next five years. But our research at Argyle, plus this survey via Digitas/Harris…plus a 2-minute conversation with your average Facebook user…paints a very different picture.

Harris Interactive surveyed 2,630 U.S. adults aged 18 years and older, of which 2,247 were identified as a social media user. Some key nuggets and thoughts are below:

55% of the sample stated that they are “uncomfortable” providing their credit card information via social media sites. You’ve gotta think that Facebook’s checkered past with regards to user data and privacy shapes this concern. I’d like to know how many of these “uncomfortable” people are otherwise okay conducting transactions on trusted sites like Amazon.com.

74% say that they would not use alternative currencies such as Facebook Credits or Bitcoin to conduct transactions on social media sites. If over half are uncomfortable providing their credit card information and 3/4 are not interested in alternative currencies, does this mean we’re left with cashier’s checks? I’d be interested to see how these two payment stats overlap.

One in five social media users agree that, where possible, they would purchase products or services from their favorite brands on a social media site. Note that this isn’t “One in five made a purchase…” – it is “One in five agree that they would make a purchase…” Unless I’m reading too much into this question, I’m not sure that this reflects the surging social commerce tidal wave that many perceive.

I found this survey useful, though there is obviously a much bigger story to tell. I’m bullish on social commerce – we’ll continue to track it closely on the Social Pros Podcast.

Want more social commerce insights? Argyle is co-producing a social commerce webcast with ChannelAdvisor later this month. Register early before we fill it up!