Social media referral traffic

No matter how large or small your social media campaign is, you should be monitoring its return on investment to your business. What you should track depends on your goals for your social media campaign – driving traffic, converting visitors to customers, or encouraging your site contents to be shared by others, among others.
To track a social media campaign effectively, you should already have an analytics package (for example, Google Analytics or Omniture Site Catalyst) interfacing with your website to give you information such as a site traffic trends, referral origins, and click paths of your visitors through your site. When it comes to social media efforts on your site, more website analytics package will let you create campaigns that isolate referral traffic to specific domain. For example, you could create a campaign that tracks which visitors are coming from MySpace, Facebook, or your own blog. If you’re already using Google analytics, you can install the “Better Google Analytics” extension for the Firefox browser that vies you social media metrics within the analytics interface. Besides using your site analytics to track your campaigns, several tools specifically track social media campaigns. Some examples are:
For twitter, Hoostsuite (www.hootsuite.com) shows statistics associated with your Twitter account, such as the number of users who clicked on a link within a tweet. SocialToo (www.socialtoo.com) tracks who follows and unfollows you on Twitter, TweetStats (www.tweetstats.com) provides graphs of Twitter stats such as your tweets over time and reply statistics, and Twitter counter (www.twittercounter.com) shows you statistics of followers and whom you’re following, plus your tweet over time.
If you’re using social bookmarking as part of your campaign and want to track how others are sharing your article, tools like PostRank (https://analytics.postrank.com) track bookmarks of your content on Digg and StumbleUpon (as well as shares on twitter).
If you’re using Facebook Advertising, Facebook insights contain built in statistics that can tell you the performance of your ads if you’re using Facebook Advertising.
Along with paid tools like Radian6 (www.radian6.com) , free tools like Addictomatic (www.addictomatic.com) let you monitor your brand across blogs, forums, social networking sites, and more.
Finally, for quick and free monitoring, Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) emails you new content picked up by Google that relates to keywords you want to track, such as your brand name.