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 tracking tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen to online social conversations
- Identify consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can start a meaningful conversation 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 content. If you’ve been searching for cost-effective ways to increase sales with social media, then check out this list of 30 social media management tools & resources.
Social Media Tracking Tools For Business Owners
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, or your competitors 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, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up with the latest news about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and monitor what other people say about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for gathering news about people, companies, and any other topic you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots crawl a new web site, press release, news update, blog post, 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 tutorial on how to set up Google alerts here: How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social profiles 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, streamline workflows amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations from the dashboard, and collaborate with teams.
Hootsuite is one of the most used 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.com)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will then post the content 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 a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps for iOS and Android devices and a browser extension.
More information: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress)
Social Metrics is a plugin for WordPress that tracks social signals from leading social networks like Twitter, GooglePlus, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Digg, and LinkedIn.
Some of the powerful features included in Social Metrics include Excel-like conditional formatting, built-in and external widgets, sort, search and filter data, export data capabilities, 1-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article on Social Metrics Pro here: SocialMetrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketing campaign. You can easily engage with your audiences, schedule messages, manage your social networks, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes lots of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, popular Twitter topics discovery tool, built-in reply to Facebook comments, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and more.
For more information, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a premium tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in social Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here for more info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management and reporting tool that lets you track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.
Social Report 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 info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios to connect with anyone, 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..
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 your 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, understand who you follow, and more.
Go here for more info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve is a social media monitoring tool for SMBs, analysts, online marketers, content marketers, and community managers. Beevolve allows you to monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales, conversion, and engagement ROI, buzz, social sentiment, and more for those posts from one platform.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring tool that lets you monitor brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics on 35+ social media channels and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on those social media sites.
Visit this site to learn more: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention helps any type of business monitor the web.
Mention uses algorithms that 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.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that software applications like Google Analytics can also help monitor posts made to your social sites.
Hootsuite has published a useful six-step tutorial on tracking social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you integrate share, like, and follow social plugins and commenting features with your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your content is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
The Facebook Insights dashboard tracks when your target audience is on Facebook to help you improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most comments, shares, and likes and to learn about about your audience. You can then use this data to publish content when your content is most likely to reach more targeted people.
To learn more, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a break down of your profile views, followers, top tweets, tweet impressions, 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 Twitter strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
For more information, go here: 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 realtime, overview, revenue, engagement, and watch-time reports.
For more information, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore 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. With Pin insights, you can get information that helps you learn who your audience is and what your customers want.
More information: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Tools & Services
New tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media tools and services. Keep in mind that web technologies are continually evolving. If anything changes in the list below, please contact us.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal lists and share these lists with family, friends 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 your customers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. 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 is now part of ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing 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 questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “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 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish updates, monitor conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and engage with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands looking for ways to promote their products and services with bloggers who are willing to write content aimed at bringing brands positive media attention.
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 featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ 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 customers and influencers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and view Twitter analytics data.
Contax.io
Contax.io lets you track your friends and followers on Twitter and other social networks and manage relevant, real-time relationship data.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will 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 Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps 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 that lets you 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. With Everytime, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online via social collaboration.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which lets you search Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is 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 location, content, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a social media monitoring and performance analysis tool. Klout rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, brings influencers and brands together, 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 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 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 social media monitoring application designed specifically for Pinterest users. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results across the Pinterest network.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot helps you gain more Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a bookmarklet, create pin alerts, find which are your top performing boards and pins, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, your selected keywords, and searches. 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’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. Analytics are displayed to users using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (SocialEngage, 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 bloggers, online merchants, and consumers 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 provides a complete social data platform for conducting social business One web-based solution provides all the tools you 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 being acquired, 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 a targeted audience, measure, manage and monetize your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.
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 all of 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 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 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 global agencies and brands. Users can cut through social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure their digital reputation, manage 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 in real-time and historically across all social channels. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into 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 fast, simple, and affordable 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 the click of a button, teams can share content with their social networks, prospects, and customers.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides different ways to search for users that might be interested in your brand. Once you find your targeted group of users, you can easily interact with users by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter then notifies those users via email and mobile notifications, and if they are interested, they can 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, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you 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 Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other social service you use. You can quickly know which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets users on Twitter view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results of what your friends are sharing on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
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We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about using the WP CMS platform to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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