On a traditional web site or self hosted blog, you can log into your hosting stats or use a service like google Analytics and you have an at-a-glance synopsis of the traffic visiting your site. But with more and more people using a social networking profiles as their defacto web presence, or integrating social networking into both their personal and professional lives, one thing lacking within the social networks themselves is a way to see who is visiting your profile, how they got there, what browser they’re using, etc.
SocialToo has taken this social networking lack-of-stats problem by the horns and launched a new analytics layer attached to its already existing url redirect service.
SocialToo founder Jesse Stay says:
“We’re extending our existing Facebook profile redirect URLs, which redirect yourusername.socialtoo.com to your Facebook profile, and adding an additional layer of analytics to the whole process. So tonight you’ll be able to get a Facebook vanity URL and get the SEO benefits, but the URL you’ll want to hand out to all your friends will be your SocialToo vanity URL because we’ll provide statistics around those clicking on the URL, the browsers they’re using, where they’re located, and where they’re clicking from (if available).”
This is useful for anyone wanting to keep a closer eye on their social networking efforts, especially people who depend on social networking as part of their livelyhood. You can track the effectiveness of certain campaigns you run, what type of memes are the most effective, what to avoid, etc. The possibilities are only limited by how people use and analyze the stats.
Jesse also says there’s more to come on the SocialToo analytics front:
“We’ll also soon be providing an API around this for Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed clients to integrate, retrieve, and provide further statistics for each user’s Facebook Profile. Plan on future releases also including the ability to track what Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook users are clicking on your URL as well.”
To get a SocialToo analytics for your Facebook profile, go and register at SocialToo. Then click on the link to get a special code from Facebook. Enter that code along with a SocialToo username and password but chose wisely because the username will be what your vanity URL is based on. Now click submit. No Twitter username is necessary, although that will give you additional features for Twitter. Now when you log in, you’ll see a new “SocialStats” tab with statistics for your URL.
