In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of tracking tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to demographics, psychographics, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on online social conversations
- Identify buying signals.
This information will allow you to engage in meaningful conversations with your audience 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 check out this list of 29 cost-effective social management tools & resources for business owners and WordPress users.
WordPress Tools For Media Tracking
(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, simple and easy way to access information about what is going on in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Well, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with the latest news about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people, brands and companies, and track what other people are publishing about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only only a great social media monitoring tool for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically sourcing the latest news about people, brands, companies, and any topic you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, blog post, news update, press release, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
If you want to learn how to set up Google alerts, see this simple tutorial: How To Set Up A Google Alert In Three Simple Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social media activities from an intuitive dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, quickly create and customize analytics reports, streamline workflows amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations from the dashboard, and add employees and clients to teams without sharing passwords.
Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many social networks, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
To learn more, visit this website: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you.
You can 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
Social Metrics Pro
(SocialMetricsPro)
SocialMetricsPro is a WordPress plugin that lets you monitor social signals from leading social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Digg, and StumbleUpon.
Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetricsPro include Excel-like conditional formatting, built-in and external widgets, sort, search and filter data, export data capabilities, one-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a detailed article about SocialMetricsPro. For more details about this plugin, go here: Social Metrics Social Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for entrepreneurial marketers)
Posting to your WordPress, Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook accounts can be time-consuming. To get all of these tasks done usually requires using different plugins, tools, and web applications. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single location.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful social and marketing features: built-in image-sharing designs, social stream, bulk content import & schedule feature, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and much more.
To learn more, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a robust tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here for more info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that allows you to track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.
Social Report tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, website performance and blogs, and displays your social channel data on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
To learn more, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, compare Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
Visit this website to learn more: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of powerful tools that help you work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort your followers and following lists by a range of criteria, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, search twitter bios to easily find and follow the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.
Go here to learn more: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, online marketers, analysts, community managers, and content marketers. Beevolve allows you to track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales and engagement, sentiment, social buzz, and more of all your posts.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social media monitoring service that allows you to monitor brand mentions across different social properties.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on those social sites, and what aspects of your marketing strategy can be improved.
More information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention is a social monitoring tool for businesses, marketers, CEOs, agencies, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on blogs, news, websites, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
Mention uses algorithms that take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have the ability to detect this, and access to intelligent, actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention offers apps for mobile and desktop users.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that software tools like Google Analytics can also help monitor your social campaigns.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to view a tutorial on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add social media buttons to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Insights lets you analyze page metrics like post reach, page likes, engagement, etc. to help improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have the most shares, likes, and comments and to learn about audience demographics. You can then use this data to create more of the type of content that your audience finds relevant.
For more details, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a monthly breakdown of your tweet impressions, profile visits, tweets, followers, and 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 better plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
For more information, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to video publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, real-time, revenue, watch-time, and engagement reports.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. You can use the data to improve the way you pin.
Go here for more info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Web Applications
Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related applications. Keep in mind that web technologies are continually evolving. If any of the tools below change, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal lists and share your lists with friends, family and colleagues.
SDL/Alterian
SDL Web (formerly Alterian) is an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse 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 was acquired by 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. Appinions enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. This tool provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is a powerful data analytics platform 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 access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish updates, follow conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your blog or favorite social network and engage with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the types of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that lets you collect, analyze and report on your social media data.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of your Google+ 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 lets you track your followers and friends on Twitter and other social networks and manage relevant, real-time relationship data.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and discussions on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening, and use that information to make informed business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that facilitates the growth and spread of online communities through blog comments and discussions. Millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Facebook and Twitter. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. Echofon for Twitter automatically keeps unread tweets in sync between apps 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 and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online using social collaboration.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach tool that lets you search, filter, and sort to find and prioritize your blogger outreach based on which bloggers are active and building communities on popular social networks. GroupHigh’s blog search makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on location, topics, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence via the “Klout Score”, which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your users haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares change 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 gathered from the Know About It system from the past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the Know About It system is aware of in relation to that story.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre provides users with a real-time content marketing platform that lets you engage your audience, leverage native and social user-generated content surrounding your brand, and curate Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application designed specifically for Pinterest users. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot is a social media marketing tool for small and medium sized businesses using Pinterest. You can add multiple accounts and view the performance of your boards and pins using the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, hashtags, search queries, and keywords are doing on Twitter. TweetReach shows you the estimated potential of the tweets for any given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole’s real-time dashboard shows how many people posted with your hashtag, along with the number of Retweets, Likes and Impressions your campaign is generating on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic results are displayed using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and activity 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 consumers, online merchants, and bloggers by tagging images on the web. You can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind is a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. 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 being acquired, 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 lets you discover, measure and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
RetweetRank lets you get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand conversations, competitors, and audiences that matter to you across every social channel.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media stats that tell you how your social performance stacks against wider industry benchmarks and the competition. You can create, manage, and optimize all of your Facebook and Twitter ads in one place, quickly identify your best content and top posting times, gain insights about your audience, and track your brand’s performance over the long term.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social 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, find the conversations that matter, measure their online reputation, manage consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.
Sysomos
Sysomos monitors billions of conversations and helps you monitor, analyze, gather insights and make decisions that allow you to create better services and products for your customers. Simply type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both in real-time and historically on any topic across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on your business, 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 a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, teams can share content with their prospects, social networks, and customers.
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 you with automated social networking management software. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, follow/unfollow Instagram users, schedule posts, like back photos, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search for followers on Twitter in many relevant business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other service you use. You can quickly learn which of your tweets, posts, photos, or videos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets Twitter users access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that gives you 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 topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly lets you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that shows your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.
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We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress web site publishing software to grow your business online, please see other tutorials we have published on this site.
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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com