In Part 1 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 look at a number of monitoring tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen to social conversations online
- Identify key buying signals.
With this information, you can start a meaningful conversation with potential consumers and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use to monitor social media content. If you’ve been looking for ways to improve your business results using social media, then here are dozens of great social media monitoring tools & resources
for businesses and WordPress users.
30 Media Tools For Business Owners
(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 and simple way to access information about what is happening in your industry or niche that would save you time doing research? Well, there is, and 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 and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and monitor what other people are posting online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically receiving the latest news about people, brands, companies, and any other subject you want to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, blog post, press release, news update, a tweet, video, 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 Google alerts, see this simple tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts – A Simple & Easy Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from an easy to use dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. You 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 from the dashboard, and collaborate with team members.
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 offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here for more details: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you at spaced out intervals over the day.
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.
To learn more, visit this website: Buffer
Social Metrics
(Social Metrics)
SocialMetrics is a plugin for WordPress that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your 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.
Go here if you want to learn more SocialMetricsPro: SocialMetrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any business marketing campaign. You can easily schedule post messages, manage your social media networks, engage with your audiences, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: built-in image-sharing templates, social stream, advanced link share customization for Facebook, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and more.
Go here for more info: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
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, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here for more details: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management and reporting tool 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, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns data from your social channels on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your 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 lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, compare Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends, and explore and grow your social graph..
Visit this website to learn more: 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 using a range of criteria, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, 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 which inactive accounts you follow, and more.
To learn more, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform for SMBs, content marketers, community managers, analysts, and online marketers. Beevolve allows you to monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement, sales, and conversion ROI, social sentiment, buzz, and more for those posts.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social media monitoring service that lets you monitor how business or brands are mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable.com 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.com)
Mention provides social media monitoring for businesses, CEOs, marketers, agencies, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on blogs, news sites, websites, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
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 also allows you to collaborate with other team members.
More information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that software tools like Google Analytics can help monitor your social activities.
Hootsuite has published a tutorial on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add share, follow, and like social media buttons and commenting features to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Insights can help track the number of active users on your page. This helps improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts have the most comments, shares, and likes and to learn about your about your audience. You can then use this data to publish relevant posts when your ideal audience is on Facebook.
Go here for more information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a break down of your profile visits, tweets, tweet impressions, followers, and tweets linking back to you.
Twitter’s Analytics dashboard also provides you with useful information about your tweets in the form of Tweet highlights, allowing you to plan your Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
For more details, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets you see how your channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can measure views, demographics, traffic sources, average video viewing duration, total estimated earning from video playbacks, and more.
Visit this site for more details: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. With Pin insights, you can get data about your audience and learn what they want more of.
Go here for more info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Applications
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.
Here are some other social media services. Keep in mind that new 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. It lets you create professional and personal task lists and share your lists with friends, colleagues and family.
SDL/Alterian
SDL Web (formerly Alterian) is 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 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 has been acquired by ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content. Appinions’ deep data science patent protected 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. The software provides answers to content marketers’ questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content more easily discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat runs 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can publish and schedule updates, monitor conversations, access metrics and KPI, 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 viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can 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 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
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. 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
Contax.io is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that helps you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and social media discussions on channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening, then use that information to make informed business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog discussions. 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 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 simple, streamlined navigation and an uncluttered Facebook experience, 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 sounds, images, or videos, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software that lets you search, sort, and filter 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 content, topics, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence via the “Klout Score”, which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. 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 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 collected from the Know About It 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 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 Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a social media marketing tool that lets small and medium-sized business schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts on Pinterest. ViralWoot lets you view the performance of your pins with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, search queries, hashtags, and keywords are doing on Twitter. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.
Keyhole
Keyhole’s real-time dashboard shows how many people posted with your hashtag, along with the number of Retweets, Likes and Impressions your campaign is generating on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic results are displayed to users using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform (Twitter.com, Attensity, Spinklr, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, 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 lets you link bloggers, online merchants, and consumers by tagging images on the web. Approved users 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 trends or moments in social data and route the insights back to the enterprise instantly.
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 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, manage and monetize your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
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 stats that tell you 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 media intelligence tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of leading brands and agencies around the world. Users can cut through the social noise, find conversations that matter, measure online 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 services and products 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 channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the audiences that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through many 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 one click of a button, teams can share content with their customers, prospects, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides multiple ways of searching for users that might be interested in your brand. Once you find your targeted group of users, you can then easily interact with users by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter notifies those users via mobile and email notifications, and if they are interested, they may check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated social networking Instagram management tools. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, follow/unfollow Instagram users, schedule posts, 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. You can search dozens of relevant business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other service you use. Find out which of your tweets, posts, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results of what your friends are sharing online above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social 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 that 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 tutorials and articles we have published on this site.
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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