WordPress & Social Media Tools – 2

In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.

In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools, services and applications that let you:

• Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to demographic criteria, psychographics, etc.
• Monitor and listen to social conversations online
• Identify key buying signals.

With this information, you can start meaningful conversations with a targeted audience and pitch them your message.

Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use to monitor social media activity. If you’ve been searching for ways to increase sales with social media, then here are the best social media monitoring tools for businesses and WordPress users.

Social Media Monitoring Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online

(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, easy and simple way to find out what is new in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …

Google Alerts

(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)

Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most useful tools available online for keeping up-to-date with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and tracking what other people are posting about you and your business online. Google Alerts is also free.

Google Alerts is not only useful for managing your reputation online, but also for receiving the latest news about people, companies, or any other subject you are interested in.

With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web page, blog post, news update, 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.

We’ve created a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to set up Google alerts here: How To Set Up Google Alerts - 3 Simple Steps

Hootsuite

(Hootsuite)

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social media activities from a single dashboard.

Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, 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 collaborate with team members.

Hootsuite is one of the most used social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many social networks, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.

More info: Hootsuite

Buffer

(Buffer.com)

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

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 a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app.

Visit this website to learn more: Buffer

SocialMetrics

(SocialMetricsPro WordPress Social Plugin)

SocialMetrics is a WordPress plugin that tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WP Admin 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 SEO improvement system.

We have written a detailed article about SocialMetrics. Go here to learn more: SocialMetrics Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress

Sociocaster

(Sociocaster)

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

Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes powerful marketing and social features: professional image-sharing templates, social stream, bulk content import & schedule feature, unlimited social account management (agency license), and more.

For more details, go here: Sociocaster

SproutSocial

(SproutSocial)

SproutSocial is a robust tool aimed at small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.

SproutSocial has a built-in CRM, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.

Visit this website to learn more: SproutSocial

SocialReport

(SocialReport.com)

SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that lets you 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 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.

More info: SocialReport

Followerwonk

(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)

Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze, track, sort and compare 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 Twitter Analytics

ManageFlitter

(ManageFlitter)

ManageFlitter provides a set of powerful tools that help you 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, 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, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.

More info: ManageFlitter

Beevolve

(Beevolve.com)

Beevolve.com is a social monitoring tool for SMBs, analysts, community managers, online marketers, and content marketers. Beevolve allows you to monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement, conversion, and sales metrics, social buzz, sentiment, and more of all posts.

More information: Beevolve

HowSociable

(HowSociable)

HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to monitor how your business or brand is mentioned on the social web.

HowSociable displays brand viability metrics across 30+ social channels. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on those social sites, and what aspects of your social marketing strategy can be improved.

More information: HowSociable.com

Mention

(Mention.com)

Mention allows 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 real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.

More information: Mention

Google Analytics

(Google Analytics)

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

Hootsuite has published a great 6-step guide on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.

Facebook Insights

(Facebook Insights)

Facebook not only lets you add social media plugins to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your content is performing on Facebook’s social platform.

(Facebook.com – Insights)

The Facebook Page Insights dashboard can be accessed by any page administrators and can help you with your marketing efforts by allowing you to better understand how audiences are engaging with your Page.

You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have attracted the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about your audience demographics. You can then use this information to publish content when your posts are most likely to reach your target audience.

More info: Facebook Insights

Twitter Analytics

(Twitter Analytics)

Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a monthly breakdown of your tweet impressions, followers, profile views, tweets, 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 Twitter strategy.

(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)

Go here to learn more: Twitter Analytics

YouTube Analytics

(YouTube Analytics)

YouTube Analytics provides analytics to publishers.

You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, realtime, engagement, watch-time, and earnings reports.

To learn more, visit this site: YouTube Analytics

Pinterest Analytics

(Pinterest Analytics)

Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. You can get data about your audience and learn what your customers want.

To learn more, visit this site: Pinterest Analytics

Other Social Media Applications

New tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses make sense of social media.

Here are some other social media 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

Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal to-do lists and share these lists with family, colleagues and friends.

SDL/Alterian

SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that allows you to create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.

Answerbase

Create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, view 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 is now part of ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. 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. This tool provides answers to questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content discoverable?”, 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 platform 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. Users can publish and schedule updates, track conversations, access metrics and KPI, and deliver presentation-ready reports.

Bambuser

Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your blog or favorite social network and interact with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.

BlogDash

BlogDash connects brands searching for ways to promote their products and services with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive media attention they are looking for.

BrandWatch

Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that lets you collect, analyze and report on your social media data.

Buzzflash

Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action and participation.

CircleCount

CircleCount helps users better understand how to use GooglePlus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles that include 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 influencers and customers, manage multiple profiles and schedule posts, and analyze Twitter data.

Contax.io

Contax.io is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail that helps you decide when to follow back.

Conversocial

Never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

SocialStudio

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

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 full featured, clean social apps for Facebook and Twitter. 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 photos or videos.

Everytime

Everytime is a creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online via social collaboration.

Icerocket

Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, or all of these for any keywords you like.

GroupHigh

With GroupHigh you can promote your company, products, or clients using a blogger outreach tool that lets you search, filter, 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 content, location, 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 affect your Klout Score.

KnowAboutIt

Know About It lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. 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 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 social media monitoring tool for Pinterest users. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results.

Viralwoot

ViralWoot is a social media marketing tool for small and medium sized businesses using Pinterest. Viralwoot lets you view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. using built-in analytics reports.

TweetReach

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

Keyhole

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

Riffle

Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with Twitter analytics, 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 consumers, bloggers, and online merchants 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 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 moments or trends in the data and route the insights back to the enterprise instantly.

Unified Social / PageLevel

PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, was acquired by Unified Social 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 makes it easy to discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.

RetweetRank

Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.

Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.

SimplyMeasured

SimplyMeasured provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.

SocialBakers

SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media analytics that tell you 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 powerful 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 globe. Users can cut through 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 aimed at creating 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 audiences and communities that matter most to you.

ThisMoment

ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.

Trackur

Trackur provides fast, affordable, and simple social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus 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 one 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 lists.

Followadder

Followadder provides automated Instagram management tools. 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. You can search dozens of business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.

TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other social service you use. You can quickly discover which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.

TwitterFall

Twitterfall is a UK-based service that allows users on Twitter to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.

Wajam

Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.

Addict-o-matic

Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any chosen topic.

Bitly

Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.

MyTopTweet

My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your top performing tweets.

SocialMention

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

Twazzup

Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.

TweetDeck

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

***

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

***