In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of tracking tools that let you:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests, etc.
- Monitor online social conversations
- Identify buying signals.
With this information, you can start a meaningful conversation with potential prospects online and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you’ve been looking for cost-effective ways to increase sales using social media, then here are 25+ cost-effective social media monitoring tools & resources that will improve social media marketing ROI.
WordPress And Social Media – Useful Resources For Tracking Social Activities

(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a simple and easy (and free) way to access information about what is happening in your industry or niche that will save you a massive amount of time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts

(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is one of the easiest and most useful tools available online for keeping up with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what is being said about you and your business online. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for gathering news about people, 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, blog post, press release, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to that topic, 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: A Quick & Easy Guide On Setting Up Google Alerts
Hootsuite

(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social media activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. You 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 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, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
To learn more, visit this site: Hootsuite
Buffer

(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. 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 using a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app.
More information: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetrics)
SocialMetrics is a WordPress plugin that tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
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.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Social Metrics: Social Metrics WordPress Social Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketing campaign. You can easily manage your social networks, engage with your audiences, schedule post messages, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, top viral video finder and posting tool, advanced link share customization for Facebook, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and more.
More information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial

(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a robust social media management tool built for 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 information: SproutSocial
SocialReport

(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management tool 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, website performance and blogs, and returns your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize your data by customers or business, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
For more information, go here: 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, track and sort 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.
More info: 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 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, visit this site: ManageFlitter
Beevolve

(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, online marketers, content marketers, and community managers. It lets you track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales, engagement, and conversion ROI, social sentiment, buzz, etc. for your posts.
Go here for more info: Beevolve
HowSociable

(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to monitor how your brand or business is mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics on 35+ social media sites. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
Go here for more information: HowSociable.com
Mention

(Mention.com)
Mention provides social media monitoring for every kind of business, CEOs, agencies, marketers, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on websites, blogs, news sites, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in real time.
Mention uses algorithms that 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 is cross-device compatible.
Go here to learn more: Mention
Google Analytics

(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that free tools like Google Analytics can also help monitor social campaign links.
Hootsuite has published a 6-step guide on tracking social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights

(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you integrate like, follow, and share social plugins and commenting features with your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your campaigns are performing on the Facebook social networking platform.

(Facebook Insights)
The Facebook Insights dashboard provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help you better understand metrics about page performance. You can then use this information to improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have attracted the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about your audience demographics. You can then use this information to publish more of the types of posts that your audience finds relevant.
To learn more, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics

(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a break down of your tweets, tweet impressions, profile views, 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 better plan your Twitter marketing strategy.

(Twitter – Tweet activity)
For more details, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics

(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your YouTube channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, real time, watch-time, revenue, and engagement reports.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics

(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics lets you see what Pins and boards people like most, what they save from your website, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. You can get data about your audience and learn what they want more of.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Tools And Services
Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
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 contact us.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional to-do lists and share these 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 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 is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content. 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 “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
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. Customers can access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish updates, track conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your favorite social network or blog and interact with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands searching for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers who are willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive attention they are searching for.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch allows you to listen to conversations about your brand, your products or your market with pinpoint accuracy.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus 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 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 that helps you choose when to follow back.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and discussions on social media 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 sales organizations, customer service, and marketing..
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. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Twitter and Facebook. 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 friends online, 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 audio, images, or videos, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online via social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, 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 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, topics, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout brings influencers and brands together, rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, and ranks users social influence using a “Klout Score”. 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 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 management, marketing, and analytics tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a social media marketing platform for small and medium sized businesses using Pinterest. You can add multiple accounts and view the performance of your boards and pins using built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, search queries, hashtags, and keywords are doing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for any given query.
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 metrics are displayed using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, 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 lets you link consumers, bloggers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. 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 you with all the tools you 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 then, 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 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 provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand audiences, competitors, and conversations that matter to you across every social channel.
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 your Facebook and Twitter 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 agencies and leading brands around the world. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure 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 on any topic both historically and in real-time across all social networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into communities 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 simple, fast, and affordable social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many more.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, your teams can share content with their customers, social networks, 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 users 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, 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 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, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other social service you use. You can quickly find out which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and lets users on Twitter access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam 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.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media 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 using the WordPress software to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.

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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)











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