Hubspot’s Facebook Grader will tell you your “reach and authority” on Facebook. My score is 90/100.
The tool works by analyzing the number of friends you have, how important those friends are (whatever that means), how complete your profile is, how many wall posts you have and how many groups you belong to. It turns out I haven’t filled out much of my profile and there are some other things I’ve neglected to attend to, so I only get an A-.
I can live with that, but there are others out there who seem to take issue with how the site ranks people. French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur is “outraged” that it doesn’t take into account that he has a fan page, for example (I find fan pages obnoxious myself), and gave him a score of only 97.6. C’est la vie.
How many followers do most people really have on Twitter? The average number of both followers and other members people on Twitter are following is about 70, according to the State of the Twittersphere, a new report by Web marketing startup HubSpot. But that average is skewed by elite Twitterers who have hundreds or thousands of followers. The vast majority of people on Twitter use it to keep in touch with a much smaller circle of friends and peers. For those with 50 or fewer followers (three quarters of all users), the average number of followers is 15.6 and the average number of people they are following is 18.4.
Some other key stats from the report:
—70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
—20% of Twitter users have joined in the past 60 days
—The average user has been on Twitter 275 days
Internet marketing is big money, and so is the $12 million recently raised by HubSpot, a consultancy and software provider for sites looking to improve their visibility online.
The Series B round led by Matrix Partners comes on top of the $5 million raised from General Catalyst Partners last September, bringing the company’s grand total to over $17 million.
In addition to providing paid SEO services, HubSpot offers a free search optimization tool called Website Grader that will automatically assess your website, score it on a 1-100 scale, and show you where to make changes that will get it in front of more eyeballs. The tool claims to have assessed over 300,000 sites, and your score on the 1-100 scale represents the percentage of those sites that your site tops (kind of like the SAT).
Want to know how to get your Website high up in natural search results, but don’t want to pay a search engine optimization (SEO) firm just to find out what you are doing wrong? Now you can get a free, automated evaluation of your site on Website Grader. Just type in your Website address, and it will spit out a report detailing what you can do to boost your site’s SEO juice. It even gives you a grade.
TechCrunch scored a 99 out of 100, but we do have some weak areas. Apparently, we use too many images and not enough metadata. Website Grader found 3,918,184 inbound links to TechCrunch, and 17,500 pages indexed on Google, where we have a PageRank of 7 (out of 10). Blogs by their very nature tend to do well on natural search results, because they are constantly updated and have a lot of links going in and out.
Just for fun, I typed in the WSJ.com and the NYTimes.com to get comparison stats. Both also scored a 99. But, as you’d expect, the NYTimes trounces the WSJ.com (and us) when it comes to PageRank, inbound links, and traffic. That is simply a function of being an open site versus a closed, subscription site like the WSJ.com. Here are the comparison stats:
These figures really show the penalty the WSJ.com is taking by sticking to its subscription wall. Instead of a PageRank of 9 like the NYTimes.com, its PageRank is the same as ours. The traffic rank numbers are from Alexa, so I’d ignore them. The number of WSJ.com pages bookmarked on del.icio.us or indexed by Google is a tiny fraction of what it would be if it was a fully open site. Even if these numbers are not completely accurate, you get a sense of how much a better job the Wall Street Journal could be doing to make its articles visible to the outside world.
Website Grader is operated by HubSpot, a search engine and Web-marketing optimization company hoping to get leads from the site. If you use it, don’t be surprised if you get contacted by one of its sales reps trying to upsell you to one of its paid services. Hey, you didn’t really think it was free, did you?
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