For a lot of people, traffic from social networks can be seen as this big unknown cannon of people who can’t be totally controlled or understood.

Sure, tweets drive a bunch of traffic, but it can be ridiculously hard to understand which 140-character thought has people banging on your door, and which was ignored. Trying to understand how people feel about you while streams of text about your site, the topics you care about, and #yolo rush by is an impossible challenge.

And that’s always bugged us because social is so crazy important.

When something goes viral on a social network your whole audience changes. It’s no longer just your loyal fans – now you’ve got to think about people who’ve never heard of you before or, at best, people who don’t know much about you. Getting those people to your site and making sure they know you’re out there is the difference between a good single day of traffic and a ton of new loyal fans.

Chartbeat is all about making it absurdly easy to see the important stuff that is happening right now and opening the door to actions that push the dial to its limit. No better place to do that than on social networks.

So today we’re launching the reimagined Chartbeat social view. And it’s way more than just a new set of graphs.

Our Social View is here to answer two key questions:

1. Is social driving traffic to my page?
2. Is there a conversation about me that I should be a part of?

Together, they capture who you are on the social web and give you a chance to control that rush of people to point them toward the things you want them to see.

The most obvious addition to the view is the stream on the right.

Once you link up your Twitter handle, we start tracking everyone who mentions you, and because we’re already on your page, we also track every link to your site. It’s not enough to just know when people are speaking directly to you, calling for your attention – you’ve also got to know when they’re talking about you and don’t care if you see it. By knowing when people are linking to you (even if they’re not mentioning you by name), you can really understand how people see you.

But monitoring alone is no good if you can’t act.

Which is why if you hover on any tweet you can now reply, retweet, or favorite.

Right from your dashboard, you can understand what the conversation around your site looks like and jump in when you need to. Throw favorites or retweets to your fans, and be there to transform people with questions into loyal fans.

Just as monitoring alone isn’t enough, action doesn’t mean much if you can’t see if it’s actually driving people to your page. We’re on that one, too.

In the top graph, we’re now showing both tweets from your account and every mention, retweet, and link.

The more people talking about you the higher those Twitter blue circles will shoot up. It’s no use talking if no one is listening, so we’ll always be there to tell you if you’re sending the right kind of messages.

Having people talk about you is good – having them visit your webpage where you control the content you want them to is even better, so now we’re showing those conversations alongside your site’s social traffic.

Those rushes of activity should be sending people to your page, and if they’re not, we want you to know right away. If you’re the topic of conversation you should know and you should be able to drive those people to your website.

So get social.

Head into your dashboard, link your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and let’s see how much more you can do with your social data and social traffic now.

As always, this is just the start. We’re going to be adding more networks, more data, and more ways to help you kill it out there.

If you’ve got any questions don’t hesitate to email us or sign up for our weekly Chartcorps workshops to get the inside scoop on how you can use each of our features and real-time data in general to act.