In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of tracking tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, psychographics, etc.
- Monitor social conversations online
- Identify buying signals.
This information lets you start meaningful conversations with potential consumers and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies you can use to monitor social media activity. If you’ve been searching for smarter ways to increase sales with social media, then check out our list of dozens of cost-effective social media monitoring tools and resources
for business owners and WordPress users.
Media Resources For WordPress Users
(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 know what is happening in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is, and 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 about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what other people post about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only only a great social media monitoring tool for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for receiving the latest news about people, brands, companies, and any topic you are following.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots (Googlebot) crawl a new web page, press release, blog post, news update, a video, tweet, or any other content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, create and customize analytics reports, share the workload 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 (including their app directory), and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
For more information, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and it will be posted for you.
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 the web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps for Android and iOS devices and a browser extension.
More information: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics)
Social Metrics Pro is a WordPress plugin that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
Some of the powerful features included in Social Metrics Pro 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.
Go here for a detailed article about Social Metrics Pro: SocialMetrics WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any marketing campaign. You can easily schedule messages, manage your social media networks, engage your audiences, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, Facebook fanpage finder, responsive mobile user interface, unlimited social account management (agency license), and much more.
Go here for more information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
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 for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
For more details, go here: 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.
It 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 your data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
Go here for more information: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
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 and sort 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 information: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of easy to use tools that empowers work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort 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, understand who you follow, and more.
More info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve is a social monitoring tool designed for small and medium sized businesses, community managers, content marketers, online marketers, and analysts. Beevolve allows you to monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales and engagement, sentiment, social buzz, and more of all your posts.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you monitor how brands are mentioned on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics on more than 30 social media channels and gives 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 monitoring tool for every type of business, CEOs, agencies, marketers, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on websites, news sites, blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows collaborative monitoring.
For more information, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that free software tools like Google Analytics can also help you track posts made from your website to your social accounts.
Hootsuite has published a step-by-step guide on how to track social media links with Google Analytics here.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you integrate follow, like, and share social buttons and commenting features with your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your content is performing on Facebook’s social networking platform.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights helps you better understand metrics about how users are engaging with your Page to help you with your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about about your audience. You can then use this data to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.
More info: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a break down of your tweet impressions, followers, top tweets, profile views, 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 Twitter strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets you better understand how your channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can see traffic sources, demographics, views, estimated earnings from playbacks, how long users watch videos, and more.
For more details, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you see what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. You can get information that helps you learn what your audiences want.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Tools
New tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
Here are some other social media tools and services. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional lists and share these 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 allows you to create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, browse 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. 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. 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 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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers can access metrics and KPI, follow conversations, schedule and publish updates, 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 your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can 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 part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCount is a Google Plus education tool. 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 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
Contax.io is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail that helps you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and discussions on social media channels such as 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, and use that information to make better business decisions.
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. 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 mentions and messages. 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 photos or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online via social collaboration.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, clients, or products using a blogger outreach tool 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 makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on topics, content, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that helps you analyze user’s social media influence using the “Klout Score”, which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your audience hasn’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares affect your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
Know About It lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are collected 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 tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot helps you gain Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, 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 how well your tweets, keywords, hashtags, and search queries are performing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for your given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search tracking tool that lets you track #hashtags, URLs, and keywords on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic results are displayed using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Hootsuite, SocialFlow, Lithium, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, and real-time 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 is a complete social data platform for conducting social business 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
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 an 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 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 all of your data in a single 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 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 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 their 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 in real-time and historically on any topic across all social networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the 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 various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, fast, 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 social networks, customers, and prospects.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides different ways to search for users that could have an interest 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 then notifies those users via mobile and email notifications, and interested users can check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides you 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, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search for followers on Twitter in many business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet 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. Learn which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and lets Twitter users access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
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 with the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
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We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group