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 tracking tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Monitor and listen to social conversations online
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
This information will let you engage in meaningful conversations with prospects online and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies 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 the best social media management tools & resources
for businesses and WordPress users.
WordPress And Media Monitoring
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, and your competition on social media)
Is there a simple and easy (and free) way to find out what is happening in your industry or niche that can 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 one of the easiest and most useful online tools available for keeping up with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and tracking what is being said about you and your business online. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only only a useful social media monitoring tool for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for gathering news about people, brands, 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 (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, news update, press release, blog post, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
If you would like to learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: Setting Up Google Alerts – A Simple Step-By-Step Guide
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social media activities from a single 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, share the workload amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations, and collaborate with team members.
Hootsuite is one of the most used social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Visit this website to learn more: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will post it 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 the web interface, Buffer is also available as a web browser extension and as a mobile app.
Visit this website for more information: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics)
Social Metrics is a WordPress plugin that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WordPress Admin Dashboard.
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 comprehensive article on SocialMetricsPro. For more info, see this article: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any business marketing campaign. You can easily manage your social media networks, engage with your audiences, schedule post messages, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes powerful social and marketing features: professional image-sharing design templates, social stream, responsive mobile user interface, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and more.
To learn more, go here: 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 CRM, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, custom 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 and reporting tool that lets you track and manage all of your social media accounts from one place.
It tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily 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 provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, breakdown your followers by social authority, tweet count, follower count, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends, and explore and grow your social graph..
More information: 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 your followers and following lists by a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, search twitter bios to easily find and follow the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out who isn’t following you back, and more.
For more details, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool designed for small and medium sized businesses, community managers, online marketers, content marketers, and analysts. Beevolve allows you to monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting conversion, sales, and engagement metrics, sentiment, buzz, etc. for those posts.
Go here for more info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you see brand mentions across different social properties.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics. It 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.
Go here for more details: HowSociable.com
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 access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention can also be used for collaborative monitoring.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just a web analytics application for measuring and reporting visitor behavior, unique page views, website traffic, what links are being clicked on the most on your website, etc., it can also help you monitor social campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a tutorial on tracking your social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you integrate like, share, and follow social media plugins and commenting features with your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This tool lets you analyze how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
Facebook Page Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help you see when your target audience is on Facebook. You can then use this information to improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about your user demographics. You can then use this data to publish targeted content when your audience is on Facebook.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a break down of your top tweets, followers, profile visits, tweet impressions, and top tweets linking back 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 strategy for Twitter.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
Go here to learn more: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics lets you better understand how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can track traffic sources, views, audience demographics, estimated earnings from playbacks, average video viewing duration, etc.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics lets 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 get information that helps you learn what your audiences want.
Go here for more info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Services & Aplications
Many new tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses make sense of social media.
Here are some other social media-related tools and services. Keep in mind that web technologies change. If anything changes in the list below, please contact us.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional lists and share your lists with family, friends 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
Answerbase lets you create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse 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 is now part of ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content. Appinions’ technology enables customers to optimize all stages of the content marketing lifecycle. The ScribbleLive acquisition 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?”, “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 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. Users can publish and schedule updates, access metrics and KPI, follow conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your blog or favorite social network and engage with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash 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 lets you collect, analyze and report on your social media data.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a GooglePlus education resource. 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 GooglePlus profile and it will start tracking your circles.
Commun.it
Commun.it lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on customers and influencers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and view Twitter analytics data.
Contax.io
Contaxio monitors your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail to help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on channels like Facebook, Twitter, 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, then 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 social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. Echofon for Twitter automatically keeps unread tweets in sync between apps on different devices, makes viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links 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 photos or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with images, audio, or videos, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online using social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, company, or products using a blogger outreach software that lets you filter, sort, and search 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, location, 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 using 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 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 gathered from the Know About It system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
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 Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing, management, and analytics tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot helps you grow Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a free bookmarklet, create pin alerts, track your Pinterest performance, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, your keywords, and search queries. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for your given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media tracking service that lets users track URLs, hashtags, and keywords on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic results are presented in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, interest, and real-time tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links bloggers, consumers, and online merchants 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 is a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution provides you with all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends in the 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 in the Unified Social 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
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 all of your data in a single place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful 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 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 intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of agencies and leading brands around the world. Users can cut through the social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure their online reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost the ROI of their social activities.
Sysomos
Sysomos monitors billions of conversations and helps you monitor, analyze, gather insights and make decisions aimed at creating better products and services 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 networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the audiences that matter most 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 various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides fast, simple, and affordable social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook and many more.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, teams can share content with their social networks, customers, 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 lists.
Followadder
Followadder provides you with automated social networking 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, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search hundreds of relevant business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other social service you use. Know which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets Twitter users view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that gives you search results of what your friends are sharing online on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet displays your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful 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 the WP software to grow your business online, please see other posts we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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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)