In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of tracking tools that let you:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to demographic criteria, psychographics, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on online social conversations
- Identify consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can engage in meaningful conversations with potential prospects online and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you’ve been searching for better ways to improve your business results using social media, then here are the top social management tools & resources for engaging with your ideal customers.
WordPress Resources - Media Monitoring
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competition on social media)
Is there a free, easy and simple way to know what is new in your niche or industry that will save you time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is a free, simple and useful tool for keeping up with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and monitoring what is being written about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only only a useful tool for managing your reputation online, but also for gathering news about people, companies, and any subject you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots (Googlebot) index a new web site, blog post, press release, news update, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
To learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this simple tutorial: Setting Up A Google Alert – A Simple And Easy Step-By-Step Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, create and customize analytics reports, streamline workflows amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations, and collaborate with team members.
Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
For more details, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will post it for you at spaced out intervals over the day.
Buffer allows you to schedule updates for a day, week, or month. Scheduling times are preset, but you can change these in your settings. In addition to using a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app.
Go here for more info: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(Social Metrics)
Social Metrics is a WordPress plugin that tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetrics include Excel-like conditional formatting, built-in and external widgets, sort, search and filter data, export data capabilities, one-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
We have written a detailed article about SocialMetrics. To learn more about this plugin go here: SocialMetrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for online marketers)
Posting to WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin can be time-consuming. To get all these tasks done usually requires using different web apps, plugins, and tools. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one location with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster includes powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, Facebook fanpage finder, built-in reply to Facebook comments, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and much more.
Go here to learn more: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in social Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
For more information, go here: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management tool that allows you to track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.
It tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns data from your social channels on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
Go here to learn more: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze their tweeting habits, track, sort and compare followers, match your activities to gains and losses in followers to give your followers what they like best, discover who your most important, influential followers are, where they are located, when do they tweet, hone your social graph by following and unfollowing users, etc.
Go here to learn more: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with a set of easy to use tools to empower you to work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort followers and following lists by a range of criteria, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, easily search inside your Twitter stream to find and follow the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, understand who you are following, and more.
More information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool designed for SMBs, content marketers, community managers, online marketers, and analysts. It allows you to monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement, sales, and conversion ROI, buzz, sentiment, etc. of posts from one platform.
To learn more, visit this website: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring tool that lets you see how brands or businesses are mentioned across various social properties.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics across 35+ social media channels. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and which areas you can improve your marketing on.
To learn more, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for all kinds of businesses, agencies, CEOs, marketers, etc..
Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have the ability to detect this, and access to intelligent, actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention has developed apps for mobile and desktop users.
Go here for more info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that applications like Google Analytics can also help you monitor posts made to your social media accounts.
Hootsuite has published a great step-by-step tutorial on how to track social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you integrate follow, like, and share social buttons and commenting features with your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your content is performing on the Facebook platform.
(Facebook Insights)
The Facebook Insights dashboard can be viewed by all the page administrators and can help you with your business marketing efforts by allowing you to better understand page performance.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most comments, likes, and shares and to learn about your the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish more of the type of content that your audience is interested in.
For more information, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a monthly break down of your tweet impressions, profile views, tweets, followers, and top tweets linking to you.
The Twitter Analytics dashboard also provides you with useful information about your tweets in the form of Tweet highlights, allowing you to plan your Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
Go here for more information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, realtime, engagement, watch-time, and earnings reports.
Go here for more details: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. You can use the data to improve the way you pin.
Go here for more information: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Applications
With the explosive growth of social media predicted to continue rising, many new tools and technologies are being developed to help business engage and make sense of social data.
Here are some other social media-related worth knowing about. Keep in mind that web technologies are continually evolving. If any of the tools below change, please contact us.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal lists and share your lists with colleagues, friends and family.
SDL/Alterian
SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, view Q&A content, and get their questions answered.
Appinions
Appinions, makers of an influence analytics marketing platform built on patented natural language processing and social network analysis technology is now part of ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content online. Marketers can optimize their campaigns by quickly finding, tracking and connecting with opinion leaders who are most likely to influence a trend, idea, product or brand. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat (formerly ArgyleSocial – a social media marketing platform for marketers) is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat is a powerful data analytics tool that delivers insights from social media analytics. It is a highly scalable social media analytics and management platform. Viralheat offers predictive social analytics and a comprehensive social media management stream that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can monitor conversations, schedule and publish updates, access metrics and KPI, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your favorite social network or blog and interact with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands searching for ways to promote their products and services with bloggers who are willing to write content designed to bring brands the positive attention they are searching for.
BrandWatch
accurately tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your market, or your products.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of your Google Plus profile and it will start tracking your circles.
Commun.it
Commun.it is a community management tool for building relationships and discovering leads on Twitter.
Contax.io
Contaxio is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail that can help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment about your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your customer service, marketing, and sales organizations..
Disqus
Disqus integrates with WordPress and can be used instead of the built-in WordPress commenting system to expand the power of social discussions online. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. Echofon for Twitter means you’ll never read a tweet twice by avoiding duplicate alerts on different devices, makes sharing media simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides real-time chat that lets you quickly send and receive messages to any of your online friends, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post videos or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with videos, audio, or images, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online with social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Icerocket is a social search engine which lets you search Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach tool that lets you filter, search, and sort to find and prioritize your blogger outreach based on which bloggers are active and building communities on popular social networks. GroupHigh makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on topics, location, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout brings influencers and brands together, rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, and ranks users social influence using a “Klout Score”. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your friends, fans, and followers haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares affect your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
Know About It is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. The stories are collected from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results across the Pinterest network.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a social media marketing platform that lets small and medium-sized business schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts on Pinterest. Multiple accounts can be added to the tool and you can view the performance of your boards and pins with built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, search queries, and keywords. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for your given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring tool that lets you track keywords, #hashtags, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Analytics are presented to users using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, interest, and tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii lets you link bloggers, online merchants, and consumers by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. Users can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind provides a complete social data platform for conducting social business One web-based solution provides users with all the tools they need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments in social data and instantly route insights back to the enterprise.
Unified Social / PageLevel
Unified Social acquired PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, in January 2013. Since then, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated with Unified Social’s operating platform. These tools form a complete marketing suite allowing top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow provides powerful tools designed to help you grow and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics delivers enterprise SEO and content marketing analysis, recommendations, forecasting and reporting for companies that want potential customers to find them faster.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides easy social media analytics for your data in a single place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats that let you see how your social performance stacks against wider industry benchmarks and the competition. You can create, manage, and optimize all your Twitter and Facebook ads in one place, quickly identify your best content and top posting times, gain powerful insights about your audience, and track your brand’s performance over the long term.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social media intelligence tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of leading brands and agencies around the world. Users can cut through the social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure online reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost the ROI of their social activities.
Sysomos
Sysomos provides powerful social media analytics that lets you monitor, analyze, gather insights and make decisions that allow you to create better products and services for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both historically and in real-time on any topic across all social networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the audiences that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, fast, and affordable social media monitoring.
TrapIt
Trapit is lets you easily support your sales enablement, social selling, and employee advocacy efforts by providing relevant content to your employees. With one click of a button, your teams can share content with their customers, social networks, and prospects.
Tweepi
With Tweepi, you can follow a @user’s followers, follow a @user’s friends, follow using a Twitter list, and follow by copy/pasting a list.
Followadder
Followadder provides automated Instagram management tools. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, schedule posts, follow/unfollow Instagram users, like back photos, automate photo likes and direct messaging, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search hundreds of relevant business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other service you use. Discover which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets Twitter users access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
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We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about using the WordPress web content management platform to grow your business online, please see other tutorials we have published on this site.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)