One of the many reasons businesses jump into social media is to increase and drive traffic to their website in an effort to help convert browsers to buyers. While social sites are great for tracking how many followers, posts and likes you have on their platform they don’t do a great job telling you how that effects the big picture.

To track how traffic from social sites is getting to your site there are a few tips you can follow outside of just posting links on Twitter and Facebook and hoping for the best.

1) Ensure you have an analytics tool (for example Google Analytics) installed and running properly on your website to help see referred traffic and check it often to tweak your focus and message if needed.

2) Use a link shortener like bit.ly or a management tool like Hootsuite that integrates a link shortener and tracks click throughs and regulalry check your metrics. What is getting clicked and what is getting ignored? Is it the link or the presentation?

3) Use custom landing pages and conversion pages for different platforms to see exactly how many people clicked on a link and converted on the landing page, this could be them signing up for a newsletter, downloading a white paper, filling out a survey or entering a contest.

And to give you some insight into which social platforms are most successful at driving traffic to websites here are the top 7 social sites in October of 2012 for referring traffic to other sites in Canada. These are the top 7 out of: Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Twitter, reddit, Digg, MySpace, NowPublic, iWiW, orkut, Fark, Delicious, VKontakte, Hi5, Yahoo! Buzz, Vimeo, Mixx, FriendFeed, Hyves, Bebo, Tuenti, Kaboodle and Odnoklassniki… and the winners are:

Any surprises there for you? Now with that info, pick your platforms and post away!