You can track social metrics (the number of likes, shares, tweets etc.) for your web pages by looking at the individual services (e.g. Facebook for example offers 'insights'). If you know how, you can also use snippets of javascript in your pages and get all that info in Google Analytics. But wouldn't it be so much easier if you could just consolidate all that social media monitoring information in one place, in one tool without having to mess with javascript and the like? Yes? Well, you can...
Armed with just some Google Docs and a bit of API documentation for the services you're interested in you can track those metrics quite easily. By importing counts of tweets etc. into a Google Docs spreadsheet you can get an instant view of how much buzz there is around your pages. If you just want to go ahead and use the tool, here it is.
The tool is simply a spreadsheet that uses the importdata function to pull data about each url from Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook via API calls. The API calls used are available in the top row of the sheet, but here they are, for reference:
Facebook monitoring: http://graph.facebook.com/?id=
Linkedin monitoring: http://www.linkedin.com/cws/share-count?url=
Twitter monitoring: http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=
You can see the sort of thing these API calls return if you just type one into a browser, e.g. http://graph.facebook.com/?id=https://www.vitispr.com returns this data:
