Looking back on last week’s post, I realize I didn’t get to cover all the ground about PostRank that I wanted. Today, I’ll finish by covering the Overview, Trends and Optimize functions of this great metrics tool.

The Overview section looks back at engagement for your most recent posts and gives you a reading on your pageviews and engagement score for the previous day.  With the calendar on the right side (see below), you can quickly review your collective engagement over the previous days and weeks.  You can also review engagement trends from the past three months and check out highlights, recent events and activity.  Below the chart you can see the most recent activity from various social networks like Twitter, Delicious, Diigo, Digg and so on.

Head to the Trends section to see your top 10 posts from the last three months, as determined by your total engagement points (read last week’s post for more on engagement points.) To give this section more depth, PostRank provides the number of pageviews, total engagement events and points in a very accessible way, and let’s you click through the heading to link back to the original post.  For example, below we can see that (Sunlight’s senior writer) Paul Blumenthal’s post on the two members of Congress breaking the rules was by far the most popular post we’re had in the last three months, according to our engagement activity.

Just to the right of the top 10 posts, we see a breakdown of the social media sites that our audience uses to engage with us, the top tags associated with each post and the top authors according to engagement points. If you look closely, you’ll notice that there is a bit of a discrepancy between who PostRank notes as the top author and which post has the most engagement points. This is clearly an inaccuracy, though not necessarily a detrimental one.

The final section of note is PostRank’s Optimize function. Here you can look at ten different social media sites that you engage with and see how the users associated with each break down demographically, how to leverage those sites to the benefit of your community and check out who your top influencers are on those services. With this data we can reach out to the people who engage with and promote Sunlight, develop content appropriate for particular (and new!) demographics on specific sites and optimize how we interact with our community on these services to encourage further engagement.