In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of monitoring tools that let you:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen to social conversations online
- Identify consumer buying signals.
This information will allow you to start meaningful conversations with your 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’ve been searching for cost-effective ways to improve your business results using social media, then here are dozens of social analytics tools
for business owners and WordPress users.
WordPress Social Media Tracking – Useful Resources
(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, and your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, simple and easy way to find out what is new in your industry or niche that would save you a massive amount of time doing research? Well, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with news and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people, brands and companies, and track what other people post about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for gathering the latest news about people, companies, or any topic you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing bots crawl a new web site, blog post, news update, press release, a tweet, video, or any other content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: Google Alerts – A Quick Step-By-Step Guide
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. Users 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, 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 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.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and it will be posted 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 a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.
For more information, go here: Buffer
Social Metrics
(SocialMetricsPro)
SocialMetricsPro is a plugin for WordPress that lets you monitor social signals across leading social media networks like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Digg, and LinkedIn.
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 autoupdate functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
We have written a detailed article on SocialMetricsPro. To learn more, go here: SocialMetricsPro Social Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for entrepreneurial marketers)
Posting to your Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and WordPress accounts can be time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done usually requires using different tools, plugins, or web apps. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one location with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: image-sharing templates, popular Twitter topics discovery tool, opt-in marketing tool, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and much more.
More info: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium social media management 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, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
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 returns data from your social channels on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
Go here for more information: 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.
More info: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with a set of powerful tools that help you work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort followers and following lists using a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, 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, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.
Visit this website to learn more: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, online marketers, community managers, content marketers, and analysts. Beevolve allows you to monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, social sentiment, buzz, etc. of posts from one easy-to-use platform.
For more information, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring tool that lets you monitor brand mentions across various social properties.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics and gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
More information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention can help any type of business monitor the web.
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your business online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
For more details, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only a free and powerful analytics software application used for monitoring visitor behaviour, web traffic, unique page views and view duration, identify user browsers or web platforms, etc., it can also monitor social campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a six-step tutorial that shows you how to track social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add social buttons to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This tool lets you analyze how your site is performing on Facebook’s social platform.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Insights can be accessed by all the page administrators and can help improve your business marketing efforts by allowing you to see when users are on Facebook.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts have attracted the most comments, shares, and likes and to learn about your user demographics. You can then use this data to create more of the type of content that your audience is hungry for.
To learn more, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a monthly breakdown of your followers, profile views, tweet impressions, tweets, 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 better plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
For more information, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to video publishers.
You can measure views, visitor demographics, sources of traffic, revenue from playbacks, video viewing time, etc.
To learn more, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics lets you see 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
Other Social Media Tools And Services
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 applications. Keep in mind that web technologies change. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal task lists and share these lists with friends, colleagues and family.
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
Answerbase lets you create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, view Q&A content, and get their questions answered.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. You can optimize 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. The software provides answers to questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content more easily discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat runs a powerful data analytics application 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. Customers can publish and schedule updates, follow conversations, 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 engage with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the kinds of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that allows you to collect, analyze and report on your social media data.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google Plus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles following your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add 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
Contax.io can be used to track your friends and followers on Twitter and other social networks and manage relevant, real-time relationship data.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and social media discussions on channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you discover what consumers are saying about your brand, your products, and your competitors, and empower your team to plan, execute, and track compelling social media marketing..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that facilitates the growth and spread of online communities through blog discussions. Millions of websites covering pretty much any 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 means you’ll never read a tweet twice by avoiding duplicate alerts on different devices, makes viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides real-time chat that lets you quickly send and receive messages to any of your friends online, 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 to your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online via social collaboration.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, products, or clients using 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 topics, content, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, brings influencers and brands together, and ranks your 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
KnowAboutIt lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are collected from the Know About It system from the past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the KnowAboutIt 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, Facebook, and Twitter content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest analytics, marketing, and management tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot helps you grow Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a free bookmarklet, track what people are pinning from your website, who is pinning the most and what images from your website are trending on Pinterest with pin alerts, track your Pinterest performance, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for searches, hashtags, and keywords. TweetReach shows you the estimated potential of the tweets for any given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search tracking tool that lets users track URLs, keywords, and hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their performance results using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, and real-time activity tracking 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. Approved users 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 trends or moments in social 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 allowing top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow lets you find an audience, 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 provides easy social media analytics for your data in one place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats that let you see how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. You can create, manage, and optimize all your Facebook and Twitter ads in one place, quickly identify your best content and top posting times, gain powerful 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 social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage 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 aimed at creating better services and products for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying on any topic both historically and in real-time across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and get insights into communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, affordable, and fast social media monitoring and social analytics insights including trends, keyword discovery, automated sentiment analysis & influence scoring.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, your 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 lists.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with 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, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search for followers on Twitter in dozens of 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, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other social service you use. You can quickly discover which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based website that allows users on Twitter to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly can help you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet displays your top 10 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 you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now