In Part 1 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 examine a number of tracking tools that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to demographics, psychographics, etc.
- Monitor and listen to social conversations online
- Identify consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can start meaningful conversations with your audience and pitch them your message.
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 cost-effective ways to improve your business results with social media, then here are 25+ great social media analytics tools for better understanding your audience.
WordPress And Social Media Monitoring
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, and your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, easy and simple way to access information about what is going on in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Well, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is one of the easiest and most useful online tools available for keeping up with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and monitoring what other people are saying about you and your business online. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically receiving the latest news about people, companies, or any other topic you are following.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing bots crawl a new web page, press release, blog post, news update, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
To learn how to set up Google alerts, see this tutorial: How To Set Up A Google Alert - Three Easy Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social 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, monitor conversations, quickly create and customize analytics reports, share the workload 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 a large number of social networks, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
More info: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will post the content 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 web browser extension and as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
More info: Buffer
Social Metrics
(Social Metrics Pro)
Social Metrics Pro is a plugin for WordPress that tracks social signals from many leading social networks like Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Digg, and LinkedIn.
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.
We have written a detailed article on SocialMetricsPro. Go here to learn more: SocialMetricsPro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and Linkedin accounts is time-consuming and to get all these tasks done usually requires using different software, web apps, or plugins. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single location.
Sociocaster includes powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, social stream, built-in bookmarklet, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and more.
Visit this site to learn more: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium social media management tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management and reporting solution that allows you to track and manage all of your social media accounts from one place.
Social Report tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and displays your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
To learn more, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that 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 information: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of easy to use tools that empowers work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort your followers and following lists by a range of criteria, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, 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, find out which inactive accounts you follow, and more.
Go here to learn more: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, content marketers, community managers, analysts, and online marketers. It lets you track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement and sales, sentiment, buzz, etc. of posts.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you see how brands are mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics. It gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on those social media sites, and what areas can be improved.
For more information, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention allows anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows collaborative monitoring (assigning mentions with different team members and sharing alerts), and is cross-device compatible.
To learn more, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that applications like Google Analytics can also help track social campaigns.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to view a tutorial on tracking social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add social media plugins to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This application lets you analyze how your content is performing on the Facebook platform.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
The Facebook Insights dashboard can help you track track data about your audience on Facebook. This can help improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts have attracted the most shares, likes, and comments and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish more of the type of content that your audience is hungry for.
Go here for more information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a break down of your tweet impressions, followers, profile views, tweets, and top tweets linking 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 strategy for Twitter.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
Go here to learn more: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets you see how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the real time, overview, engagement, watch-time, and revenue reports.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, what referral traffic you are getting from Pinterest, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin new content. You can get data about your audiences and learn what your customers want.
For more details, visit this website: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media 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-related tools and services. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. If any of the tools below change, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional task lists and share your lists with family, friends and colleagues.
SDL/Alterian
SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you create engaging digital experiences with your customers.
Answerbase
Create your own social Q&A community. 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. Appinions’ technology allows 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 content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. 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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers can publish and schedule updates, track conversations, 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 engage with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands searching for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers who are willing to write content aimed at bringing brands positive media attention.
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 action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use GooglePlus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles following 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 lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on influencers and customers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and view Twitter analytics data.
Contax.io
Contax.io monitors your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that helps you choose when to follow back.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, 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 informed business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a social tool that helps improve conversations online. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with full featured, clean social apps for Facebook and Twitter. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. Echofon for Twitter automatically keeps unread tweets in sync between apps on different devices, makes viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links 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 and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, privately or publicly, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, clients, or products using a blogger outreach software that lets you filter, search, and sort 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 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 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 Know About It system from the past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing, analytics, and management tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a Pinterest-based social media marketing platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Viralwoot lets you view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. with built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for search queries, keywords, and hashtags. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports with the estimated reach of your tweets based on various methods of measuring social performance.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring application that lets users track #hashtags, keywords, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic results are displayed to users using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with 16 Twitter platforms (Sparkcentral, Spredfast, Zendesk, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, 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 lets you link online merchants, bloggers, and consumers 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 users with all the tools they need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments in social data and instantly route insights back to the enterprise.
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 with Unified Social’s 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 provides powerful tools designed to grow and manage 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 easy social media analytics for your data in a single place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats that tell you 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 your brand’s performance over the long term.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social intelligence 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 their digital 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 aimed at creating better products and services for your customers. Simply type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying on any topic both historically and in real-time across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and get insights into the audiences and communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on your business, 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 GooglePlus, Facebook, Twitter and many more.
TrapIt
Trapit is lets you easily support your sales enablement, social selling, and employee advocacy efforts by providing relevant content to your employees. With the click of a button, your 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 a list.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated social networking management software. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, follow/unfollow Instagram users, schedule posts, like back photos, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, search by hashtag, create lists, 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 Twitter followers.
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. Find out which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and allows Twitter users to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam gives you search results of what your friends are sharing on top of your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet shows your best 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 powerful 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 the WordPress CMS software to grow your business online, please see other posts we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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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