Tool for journalists: Muck Rack social sharing reports

What is it? A web tool for measuring story impact and reach on social media.

How is it of use to journalists? This Muck Rack tool generates a PDF report showing the number of shares a story has had on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

Users can also view shares specifically by journalists, determined by the site's extensive directory of verified journalists from around the world.

Launched yesterday (27 May), the tool would be useful to journalists in measuring the impact and reach of their stories on social media, especially as part of a wider strategy to see what kind of content is shared best.

To generate a social sharing report, you must first have a Muck Rack account (which is free) and be verified as a journalist by Muck Rack.

Once you are logged in, click the 'who shared?' tab in the top navigation bar and input the link you want to measure. Then click 'count shares'.


Screengrab from MuckRack.com

You will then be able to see how many total shares the article has had, and a break down by social network.

For example, you can see that a story I recently wrote for Journalism.co.uk, Vice launches multimedia project on South Sudan, was shared 423 times in total, including 252 shares on LinkedIn and 86 shares on Facebook.


Screengrab from MuckRack.com

Muck Rack also calculates the number of 'impressions' the article has had – defined as the combined number of followers belonging to the journalists who shared the link on Twitter (although it is worth noting that not all of these people will have engaged with the link).

The ability to view a story's social sharing has been available on Muck Rack for some time, but what is new is the ability to produce a PDF of these results so that they can be downloaded and saved to your computer for future reference.

To produce the report, simply click the 'generate a PDF report' button on the left.

The report will then open in a new tab in your browser.



To save it, right-click (or double-tap if you're a Mac user) and click 'save as'.
You can then rename the file as you choose and save it to your downloads folder.

At the end of this article, you can see the PDF I generated using theses steps.

The PDF generator is the latest tool for journalists from Muck Rack.

In January, the site launched a social sharing bookmarklet which enables users to view social shares via an app in their web browser, without needing to log into Muck Rack directly.

• Want to know more about putting together a successful social media strategy? Journalism.co.uk is hosting a three-hour course on the subject on 12 June, led by former BBC trainer Sue Llewellyn.

Update: This article was updated to clarify that journalists with verified Muck Rack accounts can use this new feature free of charge.

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