Content that gets shared, wins. When you publish new content it's not enough to measure typical top-of-funnel metrics like unique visitors. Combining traffic with sharing bridges social and content, enabling informed decisions to build community and increase organic shares of content - on and off your site.
Track sharing of your content, both on your website and on external social sites. Use the Social Plugins report and Activity Stream tab in the Sources and Pages reports to see off site actions and conversations.
If you have Google "+1" and Facebook "Like" buttons on your site, it's important to know which buttons are being clicked and for which content. For example, if you publish articles on your site, you'll want to know which articles are most commonly shared, and to which social networks they're being shared (for example, Google+ or Facebook). This lets you create more of the type of content that's popular with your visitors, and remove features that aren't being used.
Additionally, seeing how communities engage with content off your site provides an increasingly-critical view into how your messages spread in the petri dish of social platforms.
If you’re using +1 buttons on your site, then Google Analytics will automatically report the +1 activity you receive from visitors and on what page it happened. If you use AddThis or ShareThis plugins, they will also automatically report on-site social activities. Other social plugins can be easily adapted to report to GA.
The Sharing reports can be found in the Standard Reporting tab under Traffic Sources > Social > Plugins.
Increasingly, people engage with, share, and discuss content on social networks. Over 80% of interactions with content take place on sites other than the content owner’s website. So, it is likely that most people become aware of and interact with your blog posts, videos, and articles on websites other than your own.
Typically, people see your video or blog post and share it because it’s interesting, inspiring, or controversial. The Activity Stream in Google Analytics shows the URLs they shared, how and where they shared (via a “reshare”, a "post", or a "comment" on Google+, for example), and what they said.
The Activity Stream is a URL-based method of tracking interactions away from your site, like bookmarking, commenting and sharing. It identifies when your content has been shared or subject to another social action within the communities and sites from our Social Data Hub.
The Activity Stream can be found in Standard Reporting under Traffic Sources > Social > Sources and clicking the Activity Stream tab.
Analytics
