Over 60% of the traffic to one of my membership sites comes from referring websites. Let me say that again - over half of my website traffic comes from referring websites! It's hard to believe, but it is true.
Twitter alone is responsible for 25% of my website visits over the past month. Facebook currently accounts for around 5% of my website's traffic. From these results, you could say that I am a firm believer in social media. No, that's not because of the hype around social media right now. I believe in social media because of the results I've seen.
One of the most important steps to growing your website with social media is simply understanding exactly where visitors find your website. To accomplish this, I personally use Google Analytics to track this data on my website for two reasons:
1.) It's free (Do I need a better reason?)
2.) It's easy to use and probably better than a lot of the tracking you would pay for!
Once you gain a basic understanding about where your website traffic is coming from, you can then spend your time more productively by putting more of an emphasis on your most rewarding social media outlets. When I discovered that 25% of my traffic was coming from Twitter, I just spent more time building relationships, interacting, and tweeting.
My favorite thing about Twitter is the ability to find and connect with the people you are looking for and other members of your niche! From a quick search, you can find everyone on Twitter who is talking about your industry! Twitter was simply my "MVP" or "Most Valuable [Social Media] Platform". You may find that Facebook or Digg are generating the most traffic for your website. Maybe you understand and enjoy using other social networks such as Delicious or the new Propeller.
Just find a system that works for you and stick with the media. Remember, social networking is all about how you interact with it. If you create a username for every social media outlet available online you will find yourself just trying to stay above water! Find what you enjoy and start connecting with other industry members of the online community!