For some people, social media is almost like a sport. How many followers can you get? How many subscribers can you get?

For other people, social media is their livelihood - it is how they put food on the table.

One thing that I think a lot of people struggle with is trying to single out the factors that make the biggest impact on their performance in social media.

For example, it might be your goal to get 1000 subscribers to your blog. Things have been pretty flat for the last month or so, but this week your blog has experienced a huge jump in the number of subscribers.

You have probably been employing any number of methods to promote the posts you have been putting on your blog - promoting them on Twitter, submitting them to services like Digg, making changes to your site to ensure it is SEO friendly, listing your blog on directories, making guest posts on other blogs, and so on.

The trouble is that often you have no real idea which of these activities has actually contributed to the sudden increase in your subscribers. You can often make an educated guess as to what the root cause might be - but you need to get as scientific as you can if you want to make the most of your future time spent on marketing activities.

What I think we all need is an analytics solution that gives us a summarised timeline of our activity across all of our social media and promotional channels and compares that with performance towards our goals.

It would be that much easier to track down the root cause if you could see that, for example, the day of the increase in subscribers coincided with one of your promotional tweets being retweeted by someone with a high number of followers.

If the spike in your subscriptions coincided with a number of possible contributing actions on the same day, you could zoom into that day and have a look at the hours at which each of those events occurred, available data permitting.

I think that the way such a service would work would be to aggregate data from Google Analytics and all of your social media presences, and arrange the data on a timeline similar to the mockups I have attached. This would give you a starting point from which you could then add in other actions that you wanted to track that wouldn’t have come through on any of your feeds, e.g. SEO changes to your site, or listing your blog on a directory.

This sort of system could be used for tracking the performance of your blog, website, Twitter account, Flickr account or any other internet presence with a feed of data that could be consumed by the tool.

So far I haven’t found any sort of social media analytics service that offers this type of view. If you find it (or make it), let me know, I would love to use it!