It’s the news that we’ve all been hoping for, Google Analytics have recently announced their plans to integrate social activity streams within their free analytics package thereby enabling their customers to discover who’s sharing, voting and bookmarking their content in the social sphere of the internet from the same platform that tracks website hits.
The information will be collected via ‘social stream’ and integrated into Google’s newly created social hub the platform. Proving that social media measurement is serious business, Google says, it aims to help marketers and publishers “discover off-site engagement, optimize their engagement within each social community, and measure the impact of each social channel and its associated digital investment.”
It is still early days yet , but so far Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Gigya, LiveFyre, ReadItLater, Reddit, TypePad, Vkontakte, and of course, Google+, Blogger and Google Groups have all already signed up to the service.
It still remains to be seen how Facebook will respond to these planned proposals. Facebook is the world’s biggest social network and, ever since the launch of Google+ is their largest competitor. Facebook has already refused to integrate their ‘like’ feature with Google search results, instead opting to integrate with smaller search engine ‘Bing’ and has launched its own analytics platform: Facebook insights.
With or without the integration of Facebook, this platform, which launches next year, will be highly valued by businesses who have implemented social networking into their business models and will no doubt become a major driving force within social media analytics and measurement.
Tags:Digg, Facebook Reddit, Google Analytics, social media, social media monitoring
