In Part 1 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, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Monitor social conversations online
- Identify buying signals.
With this information, you can engage in 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 tools and applications you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you’ve been looking for better ways to improve your business results with social media, then here are more than 25 cost-effective social media analytics tools for business owners.
WordPress And Social Media Monitoring
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, and your competitors on social media)
Is there a free and simple way to know what is going on in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge 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 a free, simple and useful tool for keeping up with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what other people are publishing about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only only a great social media monitoring tool for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically receiving news about people, 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 robots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, 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.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on setting up alerts with Google here: 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 activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor 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 for more information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will 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 a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.
More info: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(Social Metrics WordPress Social Analytics Plugin)
Social Metrics is a plugin for WordPress that monitors social signals from many leading social media networks like GooglePlus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Digg, and StumbleUpon.
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 autoupdate functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
Go here if you would like to learn more about SocialMetricsPro: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketing campaign. You can easily manage your social media networks, engage with audiences, schedule messages, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes powerful marketing and social features: pre-made image-sharing templates, social stream, smart inbox tool, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and more.
To learn more, visit this site: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
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 CRM, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform 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 data from your social channels on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
Go here to learn more: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze their tweeting habits, track and sort 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.
More info: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of easy to use tools to empower you to work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort your followers and following lists using 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, find out who isn’t following you back, and more.
More information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, community managers, online marketers, analysts, and content marketers. It lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement, conversion, and sales ROI, sentiment, social buzz, etc. for those posts from one platform.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to monitor how your brand is mentioned across various social media platforms.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics across 35+ social channels. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and what aspects of your social marketing campaigns can be improved.
To learn more, go here: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention can help any type of business monitor the web.
Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have the ability to detect this, and access to intelligent, actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
Go here for more details: 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 help monitor posts made from your WordPress site to your social accounts.
Visit the Hootsuite blog for a great six-step tutorial on tracking your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social media buttons to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights lets you analyze how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Insights can be seen by all the page administrators and can help you improve your business marketing efforts by allowing you to track the number of active users on your Page.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most shares, comments, and likes 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 finds relevant.
For more details, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a breakdown of your top tweets, profile views, tweet impressions, 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 strategy for marketing Twitter.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets publishers better understand how their channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the real-time, overview, earnings, watch-time, and engagement reports.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics helps you see what Pins and boards people like most, 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 get information that helps you learn who your audience is and what they want.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Services And Web 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.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related tools. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal to-do lists and share these lists with family, colleagues and friends.
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 your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse 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 that lets you plan, create and distribute content online. Marketers can optimize their campaigns by quickly finding, tracking and connecting with opinion leaders who are most likely to influence a trend, idea, product or brand. Appinions 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?”, “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 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers can publish and schedule updates, access metrics and KPI, monitor conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your blog or favorite social network and engage with viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the types of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.
BrandWatch
accurately tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your products or your market.
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 Google Plus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles following your profile. If your profile isn’t already being monitored 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 analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contaxio 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
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and social media discussions on channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you discover what consumers are saying about your brand, your products, and your competitors, and empower your team to plan, execute, and track compelling social media marketing..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog comments and 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 means you’ll never read a tweet twice by avoiding duplicate alerts on different devices, makes viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links 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 photos and videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with audio, videos, or images, you can save any moment 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.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social 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 software that lets you sort, search, and filter 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 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 friends, fans, and followers haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares change your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
KnowAboutIt lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. 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 KnowAboutIt 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 Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing tool. Tailwind 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. Viralwoot lets you view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. using the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for searches, 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 tracking service that lets you track #hashtags, URLs, and keywords on Twitter and Instagram. Users can view their performance metrics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform 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. 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 gives you all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments in the 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 for top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow makes it easy to discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.
RetweetRank
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics delivers enterprise SEO and content marketing analysis, recommendations, forecasting and reporting for companies that want potential customers to find them faster.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats 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 Facebook and Twitter 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 agencies and leading brands around the world. Users can cut through social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure their digital reputation, manage 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. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying on any topic both in real-time and historically across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, simple, and fast social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook and many more.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With one click of a button, your teams can share content with their customers, prospects, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides different ways of searching for users that could have an interest 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 email and mobile notifications, and interested users can check your profile and follow back.
Followadder
Followadder provides 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, automate photo likes and direct messaging, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you 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 and any other social service you use. Know which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows users on Twitter to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
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 search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
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 WordPress to grow your business online, please see other posts we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now