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.

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What do you think about this idea - create a tool that makes it dead-easy for owners of user content-driven websites to drop-in the ability for users to access detailed analytics about the content that they have created.

I think that narcissistic social media addicts would love the ability to track how popular their postings are on their favourite sites.

Now that Google have released an API for Google Analytics, it would be relatively easy to piggyback off website owners’ existing GA accounts, slice the data up and present the analytics relevant to a particular page or section of the site that your current user is interested in.

Clicking on a ’stats’ link beside any of their posted content could take the user to a page full of funky flash charts illustrating their recent rise to fame. Widgets such as top 10 content and user popularity rankings could be derived from the analytics data and posted on home and profile pages. Users could be alerted by email or IM when their content has just gone viral, then transported to a real-time updating page where they could watch the action unfold.

I think that the sell to website owners would be pretty easy - they stand to increase user engagement and frequency of visits to their site, and they are giving their most fanatical users exactly what they want - which is always a smart thing to do.

I did some experimentation with a really nice feature in Google Analytics called event tracking the other day, and I wrote about it in the thruSITES blog.

Theoretically, you could trigger an event for almost any sort of event within the user interface of your web site. You could even do tricky stuff like record how far users get through a form before bailing out. Or even how long users are taking to get through a form on average, using the optional_value field.

Read the whole post: Event tracking in Google Analytics.