You may have 60,000 followers on Twitter but if this isn’t resulting in increasing your traffic you need to see why. I’ll be looking at that in part two but for now I’m going to show you how you can set up Google Analytics to work for you and track in one place how your social media is performing in relation to your other traffic sources – direct, search and other referring sites.

First thing to do once logged into your Google Analytics account is click on ‘Advanced Segments’ and add new segment.

Under ‘traffic sources’ you need to drag the button for ’source’ to the dimension or metric space. Change condition to ‘Matches regular expression’ then in the box next to it you want to add in all the Social Media you use like Twitter and Linked etc. separating each one like this twitter|facebook|linkedin. Once that’s done, name it and save it and your social media tracking is complete.

To view this in action head to your visitors overview. In the right hand corner above the graphs you can see the advance segments option. You can either tick your new customised segment and see just your visitors and page views received from social media or by ticking all visits as well you can see how this compares to the total traffic figures for the site.

Before setting this segment up you would have had to go to referring sites and look for each of the social media networks you’ve used but now you can get one figure for all those networks combined. By clicking traffic sources you can compare this with other referring sites, traffic received from search and what comes in directly, giving you a complete picture of your social media campaign performance.

(UPDATE)

Since publishing this post The Manchester Evening News report on the story has confirmed that United’s neighbours and rivals Manchester City have also advised their players not to set up social networking pages.

Manchester United football club have banned their players from maintaining social network profiles on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitter accounts held by players Darren Fletcher, Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs were all removed, as revealed by football blog EPL Talk. Ryan Giggs also had content removed from his Facebook page as well as team mate Rio Ferdinand.

The football club may have done this to make sure traffic that they feel should be coming to their website isn’t aimed elsewhere and missing out on revenue opportunities.  Although there are literally thousands of fan created sites around out of their control so it seems that they are doing this to protect themselves from any comments from their players getting them in trouble as has already happened in the sporting world.

With many incidents causing teams to punish or ban permanently players from using social networking sites this won’t be the last time professional sports and social media will collide. Read the rest for my favourite incidents where sports teams have put their foot down over social networking or a star player has landed himself in a bit of bother.

Darren Bent is probably the best example of how Twitter has allowed football fans to gain a closer insight into a footballers life that regular interviews don’t and it even secured him a move away from his old club Tottenham Hotspur when his move to Sunderland hit a snag. His outburst about chairman Daniel Levy had to be deleted but with the press reaction and subsequent completion of the move Twitter had entered the sporting mainstream conscience.

American football player Antonio Cromartie was fined $2,500 for complaining about the team meals the players were served.

Aussie cricketer Phillip Hughes revealed he’d been dropped for the third test during the Ashes series last year in England.

And finally, want away footballers beware as it doesn’t always work out like it did for Darren Bent as Crystal Palace youngster Ashley-Paul Robinson found out when he revealed he was having trials with Fulham on his Facebook page, not realising the papers would soon pick up on this story. He was subsequently told by Crystal Palace to look elsewhere and now plays for Dulwich Hamlet, many leagues below that of either Palace or Fulham.

With the national press using Twitter more and more to source stories, professional sports team may start clamping down on their players using social networking, but I like many others hope this won’t stop us getting an insight into a sport stars world.

Startups cash in on Twitter with pay-per-tweet from the San Franscisco Chronicle

How small newspapers can make money from Twitter from Econsultancy