This is a guest post from Beth Blanchard – Supervisor, Internet Media – and Kristen Sala – Senior Manager, Electronic Media – at Cision.
Once again, Cision is pleased to present our Top 100 U.S. Social Media, Internet Marketing and SEO blogs.With this year’s list we’ve considered only US-based blogs, which has allowed us to shine a spotlight on some blogs that did not make previous lists. In addition, many industry heavy-weights have moved down, making way for new voices and fresh perspectives. Nearly half of the titles are first-timers.
To compile the list, we chose four Web audience metrics from Compete.com: Average Unique Visitors per Month (available in CisionPoint), Average Page Views per Month per Unique Visitor, Average Time (seconds) per Month per Unique Visitor, and Average Visits per Month per Unique Visitor. Using Cision’s media database, we were able to find over 400 blogs covering social media, online marketing and SEO. From there, we winnowed it down to US-based blogs that primarily focus on these topics. Finally, we ranked the blogs based on the four Compete metrics. Tied scores were broken by UVPM.
As an added bonus (and as part of our on-going campaign to list social profiles for media outlets and contacts in CisionPoint) we’ve taken special care to seek out the Twitter Handles, as well as Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn pages affiliated with these prestigious blogs. We’ve also noted the movement in rankings compared to last year. Without further ado, here are the results.
Disclaimer: a question we’ve addressed often on this blog and in many of our free Cision Webinars, with all the metrics available for determining influence on the social Web, how can you determine which blogs really matter? Unfortunately there isn’t one metric that serves as a reliable indicator. As Jay noted in his original list, influence is subjective by nature and we’ve read a lot of great posts by bloggers who didn’t make the list. Some of them wield more influence in social media education endeavors outside of their blogs, such as conferences, Webinars, podcasts and white papers.
UPDATE 4/17/12: Our original analysis accidentally overlooked 1 top 100 blog, which has since been added to the list below. It was an accidental oversight on our part, and our apologies go out to Olivier Blanchard… an amazing blogger who should have been on the original list.
