In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Listen to online social conversations
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
This information will let you start a meaningful conversation with a targeted audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you are looking for smarter ways to increase sales with social media, then check out this list of dozens of social media monitoring tools and resources.
Essential Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competition on social media)
Is there a free, simple and easy way to access information about what is happening in your industry or niche 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 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 is being published online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering information about people, brands, companies, or any subject you are following.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots crawl a new web page, press release, blog post, news update, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
To learn how to set up Google alerts, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: A Simple Step-By-Step Guide On How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, quickly create and customize analytics reports, streamline workflows amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations, and add employees and clients to teams without sharing passwords.
Hootsuite is one of the most used 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.
Go here for more information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will then automatically post it for you at spaced out intervals over the day.
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 web browser extension and as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
For more details, go here: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetricsPro Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress)
Social Metrics Pro is a plugin for WordPress that lets you track Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
Some of the powerful features included in Social Metrics 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. To learn more about this useful tool go here: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your WordPress, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook accounts is time-consuming and to get all these tasks done you usually need to use different tools, plugins, and web apps. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one single location.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: professional image-sharing templates, social stream, coupon marketing tool, unlimited social account management (agency license), and much more.
More information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium social media management tool aimed at small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in CRM, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
For more information, go here: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management solution 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 returns data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze, track, sort and compare followers, match your activities to gains and losses in followers to give your followers what they like best, find and connect with new influencers in your niche, where they are located, when do they tweet, hone your social graph by following and unfollowing users, etc.
To learn more, go here: Followerwonk
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 using 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 influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out who isn’t following you back, and more.
More information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve is a social monitoring tool for SMBs, community managers, online marketers, content marketers, and analysts. It allows you to monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, social sentiment, buzz, and more of all your posts from one platform.
Go here for more details: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you monitor brand mentions across different social media properties.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics and delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and what areas can be improved.
More information: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention is built on a simple idea of allowing anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows you to collaborate with other team members.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful applications like Google Analytics can also help monitor links posted from your website to your social accounts.
Hootsuite has published a six-step guide on tracking your social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add like, share, and follow social buttons and commenting features to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your content is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
The Facebook Insights dashboard can help you analyze metrics like post reach, page likes, engagement, etc. This can help you with your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have attracted the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about your audience demographics. You can then use this data to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.
For more information, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a break down of your followers, profile views, tweet impressions, tweets, and tweets linking back to you.
Twitter’s Analytics dashboard also provides you with useful information about your tweets in the form of Tweet highlights, allowing you to plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets video publishers better understand how their channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can see traffic sources, views, demographics, how long users watch videos, revenue from playbacks, and more.
To learn more, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. With Pin insights, you can use the data to improve the way you pin.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Applications
New tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses make sense of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related tools. Keep in mind that new web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional task lists and share your lists with colleagues, family and friends.
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
Answerbase lets you create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, view Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions, makers of an influence analytics marketing platform built on patented natural language processing and social network analysis technology has been acquired by ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. Appinions’ technology allows customers to optimize every stage of the content marketing lifecycle. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. This tool provides answers to questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat (formerly ArgyleSocial – a social media marketing platform for marketers) is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat runs 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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can schedule and publish updates, access metrics and KPI, track conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and interact with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands searching for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive media attention they are searching for.
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 GooglePlus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles in which you are included. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add 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 tracks your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail that can help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening on social media, and use that information to make better business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a social tool that aims to help improve conversations online. Millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with full featured, clean 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 to 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. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your products, company, or clients using a blogger outreach software 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 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 helps you analyze user’s social media influence via the “Klout Score”, which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. 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 change your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
Know About It lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are gathered from the KnowAboutIt 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 lets you collect and manage content from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing, analytics, and management tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot is a social media marketing tool that lets business on Pinterest schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts. Multiple accounts can be added to the tool and you can view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. using the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, search queries, keywords, and hashtags are doing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for your 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. Users can assess their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Mention, TweetDeck, Salesforce Desk, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, and social monitoring tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links consumers, online merchants, and bloggers by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. You can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind provides 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 moments or trends in the data and route the insights back to the enterprise instantly.
Unified Social / PageLevel
PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, was acquired by Unified Social in January 2013. Since being acquired, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated with Unified Social’s operating platform. These tools are part of a complete marketing suite for top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow lets you find a targeted audience, measure, manage, optimize and monetize your social media presence.
RetweetRank
RetweetRank lets you get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics lets you see important key performance indicators such as the visibility of a page in social media.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful 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 of your Twitter and Facebook ads in one place, quickly identify your best content and top posting times, gain insights about your audience, and track long-term brand performance.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social media intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of agencies and leading brands around the globe. Users can cut through the social noise, find conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.
Sysomos
Sysomos provides powerful social media analytics that lets you monitor, analyze, gather insights and make decisions aimed at creating better services and products for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both in real-time and historically on any topic across all social channels. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the audiences and communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides fast, simple, and affordable social media monitoring and social analytics insights including trends, keyword discovery, automated sentiment analysis & influence scoring.
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, prospects, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides a number of different ways of searching for users that might be interested in your brand. Once you find your targeted group of users, you can then easily interact with them by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter notifies those users via email and mobile notifications, and if they are interested, they can check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated Instagram management software. 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, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search for Twitter followers in many business categories or search your geographical area.
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. Learn which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and lets users on Twitter 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.
Addictomatic
Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page that displays 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
My Top Tweet displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring 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 WP platform to grow your business online, please see other articles and tutorials we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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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