Traffic from Social media optimization can be tracked

1. Google Analytics Referral Traffic

2. Number of Friends who have added you in their friends list in each of your profile in each Social Networks.

3. Frequency of updates and quality of content posted.

4. Number of votes on your content and number of people who regularly vote on your content.

5. The Amount of content in each of your profile pages and community knowledge sharing page.

6. The Total Number of Links to and from these profile pages.

7. Number of comments and frequency. How many of them are not in your friends list.

The amount of effort that is needed to market on social networks is tracked

A Facebook or an Orkut application is like an small widget which is used by the Users of social network. Since this application interacts with lot of people, it also has the ability to interact with the external server. Google Analytics for applications can be embedded into the application giving all data w.r.t the users using the application. Developers will also get an idea about the extent to which the application was spammed by users.

Developer Analytics (http://www.developeranalytics.com/analytics.php) and http://adonomics.com/ are service which is offered to developers of application to keep in touch with the traffic, demographic data, visitor data and conversion data.

These analytical tools in combination with customized tracking which you can set at application level which can send data to external server allows developers to track a lot of information about the user profiles and get useful information such as Traffic, Demographic Data, Profile Data etc.

This data has to be used to remodel and remake applications on Social Networks to make it more useful for users and make it more spam proof. A successful application can be built overtime by building more features to app based on the data, response derived from it.

Google gives details about creating a App;

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/about/developer.html

There are 3 phases for Gadget promotion:

Create: Develop a gadget based on idea. Hire a developer for this or try out yourself. Thinking of an successful idea is Gold, however it happens by chance. Make sure it works on all kind of sites and all Browsers including remote ones like Safari.

Promote: This is the easiest and lest effort part, just add these in various webpages, sites. Give options to Add to iGoogle, My Yahoo etc.

Track and Optimize: This requires analytics and time. You must use Log file analysis tracking for analyzing the performance of visitor data, traffic data, demographic data, user quality data. Etc. For example your gadget is running on Orkut and Facebook. The number of users in facebook may be more than Orkut, but traffic from Facebook may not be of much use to your business. Then you must customize you App to favour more Orkut community users based on quality of profiles on Orkut. A popular web app can have an impact on Reputation Management and Brand on social networks apart from monetizable traffic.

This Article was originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/