Never before has it been so in demand as it is today, to follow social media. The heat of every hot-button debate has been found in the wires leading to social media servers. Today, it's vitally important for TV shows and public figures to see what people are saying, and respond to it – getting them more involved in the dialog.

Arktan, one of the companies that helps people do this, has just announced that its social curation tool (SocialStreams) now has analytics and data reporting features.

What's so important about this?

Arktan's analytics will let its customers measure more accurately how much conversation is going on during breaking news, live events, product launches and TV shows, by keeping an eye on the distribution of the conversation within any stream across all of the social media networks it's compatible with. At this point, Arktan's SocialStreams supports Facebook (News - Alert), Instagram, Facebook, GetGlue, and a whole pile of other social platforms commonly found a few feet from the faces of Internet users.

The SocialStreams conversation display will show customers a line graph that represents all the activity related to the customer's stream in a tidy interface.

But that's not the best part. Here's where it gets cool: The entire social conversation's history can be seen within pie charts that demonstrate how different conversations and comments pop up in different social networks. So, Tweets, replies (on Twitter (News - Alert)), posts on Facebook, and their comments are analyzed and interpreted for you.

There's something stimulating about being able to graphically visualize a representation about all the gossip you're looking for. It gives you a telescope with which you have the power to see everything that's trending.

The new analytics features in Arktan's SocialStreams also add to the existing platform, allowing you new APIs to tinker with.