If you've got a blog or website, you're probably trying to connect with new visitors using multiple social media channels. And when your content does go hot on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, you want to find the people that helped and shake their hand. Today we'll examine 5 easy tools used to find the people that are helping to make you popular in social media.

Social traffic is getting to be a hot topic in the industry right now. In fact, finding your social media traffic sources was an important takeaway from SES San Fransisco.

But to say it's important is one thing. How do you actually find your biggest senders of social traffic? Take a gander at some of the tools on this list and you'll find your most terrific tweeters and fantastic fans in no time.

10 Tools to Find Your Social Traffic Sources

1. Google Alerts - By now almost everyone has at least heard of Google Alerts. You may have them emailed to you or maybe you subscribe to them as an RSS feeder in your Google Reader browser. Either way is fine, but at this point, you should be using them to monitor your brand in some fashion.
2. Mentions - This is simple. Be sure to review your "mentions" stream for every social channel on a regular basis. Yes it's obvious, but it's easy to forget the basics in a world with scores of apps/services, each with infinite options for customizing how information is presented to you.
3. Backtweets.com - Did someone tweet or retweet a link to your website, sending a spike in unexpected traffic? Find out who by using Backtweets.com. Just enter the URL of the popular page and see a recent history of the people tweeting your content.
4. Google Analytics - That's right folks. Good old fashioned web analytics can tell you a lot about your social media traffic sources. Just look into the Referring Sites traffic sources on your reports.
5. SEO Site Tools - Want to use Backtweets.com and save a bunch of steps? Download the SEO Site Tools Chrome extension to automatically embed social research tools like Backtweets.com into your Google Analytics content reports. 
6. Topsy.com - Using Twitter Search or Backtweets can be frustrating with Twitter's limited search history. Topsy.com to the rescue! Topsy built their own database of tweets, making the task of examining historic tweets a bit easier.
7. Klout.com - Let's say you're a little more popular and want a macro view of your biggest social media advocates. Klout provides this and many other Twitter profile tidbits in its robust tool set.
8. Advanced Twitter Search - Never underestimate the power of using Twitter's advanced search to dig through large amount of tweets and re-tweets.
9. Google Realtime - Just recently announced, Google Realtime is Google's new way to search through the social web. Do a search for your name, brand or content and see what comes up.
10. Social Monitoring Tools - Of course, if you're a bit more sophisticated and have a budget, there are a ton of social media monitoring tools, Radian6 and Trackur to name a few, in the market right now that will deliver up-to-the minute reports on what's being said about you.

What are You Using?

Are you using any special tools or techniques to find your social traffic sources? Have you found ways to thank and promote them in a special way? Share them here in the comments below! Also, I realize that my list is a little biased towards Twitter and web searches. Can you share additional insights about finding your traffic sources on other social networks (e.g., Facebook, Linkedin, or Youtube)?