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In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market 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 specific demographic criteria, psychographic indicators, etc.
• Listen to social conversations online
• Identify consumer buying signals.

With this information, you can start a meaningful conversation with prospects and pitch them information about your products or services.

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 the best social monitoring tools and resources for businesses and WordPress users.

WordPress Social Media Tracking – Useful Resources

(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, or your competitors on social media)

Is there a free, simple and easy way to access information about what is new in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is, and it’s called …

Google Alerts

(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)

Google Alerts is one of the easiest and most useful tools available online for keeping up-to-date with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what is being said online about you and your business. Google Alerts is also free.

Google Alerts is not only only a great social media monitoring tool for managing your reputation online, but also for receiving the latest news about people, brands, companies, or any topic you want to know about.

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, blog post, news update, press release, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.

To learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this step-by-step tutorial: Setting Up A Google Alert – A Quick Step-By-Step Tutorial

Hootsuite

(Hootsuite)

Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from an easy to use dashboard.

Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. 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 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.

More information: Hootsuite

Buffer

(Buffer.com)

Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you at spaced intervals.

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.

More information: Buffer

SocialMetrics

(SocialMetrics)

SocialMetrics is a WordPress plugin that tracks social signals across many leading social media networks like GooglePlus, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Digg, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon.

Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetrics 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.

To learn more about SocialMetricsPro, see this article: SocialMetricsPro

Sociocaster

(Sociocaster)

Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketer or business. You can easily schedule messages, engage your audiences, manage your social networks, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.

Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, Facebook fanpage finder, built-in reply to Facebook comments, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and more.

Go here for more details: Sociocaster

SproutSocial

(SproutSocial)

SproutSocial is a robust social media management tool aimed at small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.

SproutSocial has a built-in Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.

Visit this site to learn more: 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, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns your social channel data on 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.

To learn more, visit this website: SocialReport

Followerwonk

(Followerwonk)

Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze their tweeting habits, 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, visit this website: Followerwonk

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 by 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.

Go here to learn more: ManageFlitter

Beevolve

(Beevolve)

Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool designed for SMBs, analysts, online marketers, community managers, and content marketers. Beevolve allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement and sales, buzz, sentiment, and more of all your posts from a single platform.

Visit this site to learn more: Beevolve

HowSociable

(HowSociable)

HowSociable is a simple social monitoring tool that allows you to see brand mentions on the social web.

HowSociable displays brand viability metrics across 30+ social media channels. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and which channels you can improve your marketing on.

Visit this site to learn more: HowSociable

Mention

(Mention)

Mention helps businesses monitor the web.

Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your business online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention has developed apps for mobile devices and desktop users.

For more information, go here: Mention

Google Analytics

(Google Analytics)

Google Analytics is not just a great web analytics application that tracks page view duration, website traffic, visitor behaviour, what links get clicked on the most, etc., it can also help you monitor posts made to your social media sites.

Visit the Hootsuite blog to read a tutorial on how to track social media links with Google Analytics.

Facebook Insights

(Facebook)

Facebook not only lets you add social 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 – Insight Types)

The Facebook Insights dashboard lets you analyze metrics like post reach, page likes, engagement, etc. to help you with your business marketing efforts.

You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish content when your content is most likely to reach your target audience.

More info: Facebook Insights

Twitter Analytics

(Twitter.com)

Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a monthly breakdown of your profile views, tweet impressions, top 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 marketing strategy.

(Twitter – Tweet activity)

More information: Twitter Analytics

YouTube Analytics

(YouTube Analytics)

YouTube Analytics provides analytics to video publishers.

You can measure traffic sources, viewer demographics, views, estimated revenue from playbacks, average video viewing duration, and more.

For more details, go here: YouTube Analytics

Pinterest Analytics

(Pinterest)

Pinterest Analytics lets you explore what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, what devices people are using, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. You can use the data to improve the way you pin.

For more details, visit this site: Pinterest Analytics

Additional Social Media-Related Tools

With the explosive growth of social media predicted to continue rising, many new tools and technologies are being developed to help business engage and make sense of social data.

The list below contains a number of other social media tools. Keep in mind that web technologies change. 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 to-do lists and share these 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 allows you to create engaging digital experiences with your customers.

Answerbase

Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, view Q&A content, and receive quality answers.

Appinions

Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content. Appinions’ technology enables 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 “what should we write about?”, “where should we publish?”, 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. Users can track conversations, access metrics and KPI, publish and schedule updates, 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 smart device and stream to your blog.

BlogDash

BlogDash links brands looking to promote their products and services with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive media attention they are looking for.

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 aimed at inspiring direct social action and participation.

CircleCount

CircleCount is a GooglePlus education resource. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles following your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of 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

Contaxio allows you to track your friends and followers on Twitter and other social networks.

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 Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

SocialStudio

Social Studio lets you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your customer service, sales organizations, and marketing..

Disqus

Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog discussions. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable.

Echofon

Echofon provides users with full featured, clean social apps for Facebook and Twitter. Echofon apps notify you of mentions and messages. 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 collaboration app for creatives. If you work with images, sounds, or videos, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, 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 at once for any keywords you like.

GroupHigh

GroupHigh is 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’s blog search makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on content, location, topics, 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 audience hasn’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares affect your Klout Score.

KnowAboutIt

KnowAboutIt is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. The stories are collected from the Know About It system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.

LiveFyre

LiveFyre lets you capture conversations from the social web.

TailWind

Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results.

Viralwoot

ViralWoot is a social media marketing tool that lets small and medium-sized business schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts on Pinterest. You can add multiple accounts and 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 performing on Twitter. TweetReach gives you the estimated potential of the tweets for any given query.

Keyhole

Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring tool that allows you to track URLs, keywords, and #hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Users can view their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.

Riffle

Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (SocialEngage, TweetDeck, Zendesk, etc) 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 bloggers, online merchants, and consumers 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 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 in the Unified Social 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 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 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 deep, competitive social media analytics 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 powerful insights about your audience, and track long-term brand performance.

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 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 products and services for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying on any topic both in real-time and historically across all social channels. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and get insights into the audiences that matter most to you.

ThisMoment

ThisMoment allows businesses to engage with everyone, everywhere. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through different 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 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 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, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.

Twellow

You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search many business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.

TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet 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 posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.

TwitterFall

Twitterfall is a UK-based service that allows Twitter users to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.

Wajam

Wajam gives you search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.

Addictomatic

Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any chosen topic.

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 media 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 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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