ShareThis is a company serving online Publishers and Brands  by measuring the social impact of their web content via tools as buttons, widgets and analytics. Today, the company has announced two new features; Audience Indexing and Social Reach.

In any business, the mantra for success is “Know your client.”  How does this carry on in the modern digital information age?  For bloggers, websites and other online publishers, measuring the success of their content is very important. One tried and true metric used to be, how many people have visited the site.  This metric has been further evolved into how many people have read the content, and thought of it as useful enough to share it. Now the latest update in Social media metrics is knowing how much influence the sharers have.  In specific terms, it means how many people have been prompted to visit your site through their share.. This is the very purpose of Social Reach and Audience Indexing.

Share This blog explains the features as follows:

Audience Index

Everyone has heard the old maxim, “Know your audience.” Until now, publishers may have known their demographic composition or “intent” profiles, but they didn’t know how their most valuable users – their influencers – compared to the rest of the web.  Our Audience Index changes all that by letting publishers:

– Understand and compare their social audiences against 850,000 other sites across the web and soon, against your own category (i.e. your site against sports) and size of site (i.e. your site against other small blogs).

– Find out what types of influencers – say Fitness or Music – your site attracts.

– Find out how well you connect with influencers, listeners and engaged consumers

Social Reach

We recently surveyed publishers (ours and others) and found that over 60% wanted (and were missing) social referral analytics. Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the web by looking at outbound sharing and inbound social traffic and, in the process, gives proper credit to the listener/responder of a share as much as the original influencer/sharer. Publishers can now get a more accurate measurement of how a piece of content circulates around the Web after it’s been shared across any service, rather than just the simple number of shares counted by a single service like Facebook.

These features shall add to the understanding of sharing psychology on the internet. Share This provides a statistical analysis of the audience base. One example of conclusion that can be drawn, is that; people are preferring to share interesting content via social networking sites rather than email.

In other social media metrics news, today also brought the launch of Sprout Social. We can safely conclude that this is not the end of the story, over time we would find even more elaborate assessment tools that are derivatives of the social media boom.