WordPress & Social Media Tools – 2

In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools that allow you to:

• Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to specific demographics, psychographic indicators, etc.
• Monitor and listen in on social conversations online
• Identify consumer buying signals.

This information lets you start meaningful conversations with a targeted audience 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 are looking for ways to increase sales using social media, then here are 29 great social management tools and resources.

Social Media Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online

(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, or your competition on social media)

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, easy and simple way to know what is happening in your niche or industry that would save you a massive amount of time doing research? Well, there is. It’s called …

Google Alerts

(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)

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 about you and your business online.

Google Alerts is not only useful for managing your reputation online, but also for gathering the latest news about people, brands, companies, and 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 crawl a new web page, news update, blog post, press release, 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.

If you want to learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this tutorial: A Simple & Easy Guide On Setting Up Google Alerts

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 social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, 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 (including their app directory), and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.

Go here to learn more: Hootsuite

Buffer

(Buffer)

Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will then post the content for you at spaced intervals.

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 using a web interface, Buffer is also available as a web browser extension and as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.

More information: Buffer

Social Metrics Pro

(SocialMetrics)

Social Metrics is a plugin that lets you track Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WordPress 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, 1-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.

We have written a detailed article on Social Metrics. Go here to learn more: SocialMetricsPro

Sociocaster

(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)

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

Sociocaster includes lots of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, social stream, responsive mobile user interface, unlimited social account management (agency license), and more.

More info: Sociocaster

SproutSocial

(SproutSocial.com)

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 social Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.

More information: SproutSocial

SocialReport

(SocialReport)

SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that lets you track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.

It tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and displays 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 information: SocialReport

Followerwonk

(Followerwonk)

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, sort and compare followers, match your activities to gains and losses in followers to give your followers what they like best, discover who your most important, influential followers are, where they are located, when do they tweet, hone your social graph by following and unfollowing users, etc.

Go here to learn more: Followerwonk

ManageFlitter

(ManageFlitter)

ManageFlitter provides 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 influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.

More info: ManageFlitter

Beevolve

(Beevolve)

Beevolve is a social media monitoring platform designed for small and medium sized businesses, content marketers, online marketers, community managers, and analysts. Beevolve allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting conversion, sales, and engagement metrics, buzz, sentiment, etc. of all posts from a single platform.

Go here for more details: Beevolve

HowSociable

(HowSociable)

HowSociable is a simple social media monitoring service that lets you monitor how your business and brand is mentioned across different social properties.

How Sociable displays brand viability metrics. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and which areas can be improved.

More info: HowSociable.com

Mention

(Mention)

Mention is built on a simple idea of allowing anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.

Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, 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 (sharing alerts and assigning mentions with other team members), and is cross-device compatible.

More info: Mention

Google Analytics

(Google Analytics)

With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful tools like Google Analytics can also help you track posts made to your social media accounts.

Hootsuite has published a step-by-step guide that shows you how to track social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.

Facebook Insights

(Facebook.com)

Facebook not only lets you integrate share, follow, and like social plugins and commenting features with your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on Facebook’s platform.

(Facebook – Insight Types)

The Facebook Insights dashboard can be accessed by any administrators of your page and can help you improve your business marketing efforts by allowing you to see when your target audience is on Facebook.

You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about your about your audience. You can then use this data to publish more of the types of posts that your audience is hungry for.

More info: Facebook Insights

Twitter Analytics

(Twitter Analytics)

Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a monthly break down of your tweets, profile visits, tweet impressions, followers, and 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 better plan your strategy for marketing Twitter.

(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)

More info: Twitter Analytics

YouTube Analytics

(YouTube)

YouTube Analytics lets you better understand how your channel is performing on the YouTube platform.

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

For more information, go here: YouTube Analytics

Pinterest Analytics

(Pinterest)

Pinterest Analytics helps 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 new content. With Pin insights, you can get information that helps you learn who your audience is and what they want.

To learn more, visit this website: Pinterest Analytics

Other Social Media Services And Aplications

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-related tools. Keep in mind that web technologies change. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know.

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal task lists and share your lists with friends, family 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 your customers.

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 get their questions answered.

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. 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. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. This tool provides answers to content marketers’ 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers can follow conversations, schedule and publish updates, access metrics and KPI, 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 interact with viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.

BlogDash

BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the kinds of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.

BrandWatch

BrandWatch allows you to listen to conversations about your brand, your market, or your products with pinpoint accuracy.

Buzzflash

Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.

CircleCount

CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google Plus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles in which you are included. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of 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 tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail to 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 discussions on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

SocialStudio

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

Disqus

Disqus is a social tool that helps improve conversations online. 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 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 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. If you work with videos, images, or sounds, 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 Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all at once for any keywords you like.

GroupHigh

With GroupHigh you can promote your company, products, or clients using a blogger outreach tool that lets you sort, filter, 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 location, content, topics, 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 audience hasn’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares change 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 gathered from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.

LiveFyre

LiveFyre lets you collect and manage content from the social web.

TailWind

Tailwind is a social media monitoring application designed specifically for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results across Pinterest.

Viralwoot

Viralwoot is a Pinterest-based social media marketing platform for small and medium-sized businesses. You can add multiple accounts and view the performance of your pins with built-in analytics reports.

TweetReach

TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, searches, and selected keywords. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.

Keyhole

Keyhole is a real-time social media tracking application that lets you track keywords, hashtags, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.

Riffle

Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.

Merchii

Merchii links online merchants, consumers, and bloggers by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. Users 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 then, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated with Unified Social’s operating platform. These tools form a complete marketing suite for 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 lets you see important key performance indicators such as the visibility of a page in social media.

SimplyMeasured

SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand competitors, conversations, and the audiences that matter to you across every social channel.

SocialBakers

SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media analytics that let you see how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. You can create, manage, and optimize all 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 and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global agencies and brands. Users can cut through social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure their digital reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.

Sysomos

Sysomos monitors billions of conversations and helps you monitor, analyze, gather insights and make decisions that allow you to create better products and services for your customers. Simply 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 get insights into the audiences that matter most to you.

ThisMoment

ThisMoment allows businesses to engage with everyone, everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.

Trackur

Trackur provides fast, affordable, and simple social media monitoring.

TrapIt

Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With one click of a button, teams can share content with their prospects, customers, and social networks.

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 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 hundreds of relevant business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.

TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other social service you use. Discover which of your tweets, posts, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.

TwitterFall

Twitterfall allows Twitter users to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.

Wajam

Wajam is a tool that gives you search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.

Addictomatic

Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any chosen topic.

Bitly

Bitly can help you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.

MyTopTweet

MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that shows your top performing tweets.

SocialMention

SocialMention is a real-time social media search engine and analysis platform.

Twazzup

Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.

***

We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress platform to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.

***