During a Q&A session on Monday's GA workshop we discussed how visits can be monitored in real time especially during the day of a conference to see the extent of interest in a particular workshop or talk. However, setting today's date (or the time period we are most interested in) using Standard reporting will also let us see the latest traffic from any social network site. See: Traffic Sources -> Social.

One of the most useful reports is found in the subcategory Pages. Under the report tab Social Referral (selected by default) we find pages that people are sharing. Under the report tab Activity Stream there are two options: Conversations and Events. These show the social networks that visitors to your site are using.

Conversations displays activity, such as people marking a page as a favourite in delicious or discussing the page in Google+. Events shows activity such as pages that people bookmark in delicious, or indicates the page that links to a particular source (called a trackback). Hovering over the right arrow of any item listed shows options for getting further information about that page. The options include: Page Analytics, View Page, View Activity and an additional option for a Google+ event View Ripple to see the effect of that event.

For more information, see the Google Analytics blog posts on social reports or tracking links to your site content.