Category: WordPress Business Strategies

In Part One 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, filter and organize users according to specific demographic criteria, psychographic indicators, etc.
• Monitor and listen to online social conversations
• Identify key consumer buying signals.

With this information, you can engage in meaningful conversations with potential prospects 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 to monitor social media activity. If you’ve been looking for ways to improve your business results with social media, then check out our list of 29 free or cost-effective social media management tools & resources that can help to improve social marketing campaigns.

Media Resources For WordPress Users

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

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple and easy way to know what is new 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 – free web monitoring service)

Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with news and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and track what other people are saying online about you and your business.

Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for receiving information about people, brands, companies, or any other subject you need to know about.

With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing robots (Googlebot) crawl a new web page, press release, news update, blog post, a video, tweet, or any other 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 create a Google alert here: How To Set Up Google Alerts In Three Quick And Easy Steps

Hootsuite

(Hootsuite.com)

Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social media activities from an intuitive dashboard.

Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, 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 leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks (including their app directory), and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.

More info: Hootsuite

Buffer

(Buffer)

Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted 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 using a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a web browser extension.

To learn more, visit this site: Buffer

Social Metrics Pro

(Social Metrics Pro)

SocialMetricsPro is a WordPress plugin that lets you track social signals across leading social networks like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, and Digg.

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, one-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.

Go here for a detailed article on SocialMetrics: Social Metrics

Sociocaster

(Sociocaster)

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

Sociocaster includes powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, social stream, bulk content import & schedule feature, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and more.

To learn more, go here: Sociocaster

SproutSocial

(SproutSocial)

SproutSocial is a premium 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 for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.

For more details, go here: SproutSocial

SocialReport

(SocialReport.com)

SocialReport is a social intelligence platform 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, website performance and blogs, and returns your social channel data 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 information: SocialReport

Followerwonk

(Followerwonk)

Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, breakdown your followers by social authority, tweet count, follower count, 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 easy to use tools to empower you to 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 influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out which inactive accounts you follow, and more.

Go here for more details: ManageFlitter

Beevolve

(Beevolve)

Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool designed for SMBs, online marketers, content marketers, analysts, and community managers. Beevolve lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement and sales, sentiment, social buzz, etc. of all your posts.

More information: Beevolve

HowSociable

(HowSociable)

HowSociable is a simple social measuring tool that lets you see brand mentions across various social platforms.

How Sociable displays brand viability metrics across 36 social media channels. It delivers 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 strategy can be improved.

More info: HowSociable.com

Mention

(Mention)

Mention is a social media monitoring tool for businesses, agencies, marketers, CEOs, etc..

Mention uses algorithms that take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your business online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows collaborative monitoring (e.g. sharing alerts with different team members), and provides apps for mobile devices and desktop users.

More info: Mention

Google Analytics

(Google Analytics)

Google Analytics is not just a web analytics software application, it can also monitor social campaign links.

Hootsuite has published a great tutorial on tracking social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.

Facebook Insights

(Facebook Insights)

Facebook not only lets you add social plugins to your website for commenting, linking, and sharing social buttons and commenting features to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your content is performing on Facebook’s social platform.

(Facebook – Insight Types)

Facebook Insights can help you better understand how audiences are engaging with your Page. This helps improve your marketing efforts.

You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have attracted the most comments, shares, and likes and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish targeted content when your ideal audience is on Facebook.

For more information, go here: Facebook Insights

Twitter Analytics

(Twitter.com)

Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a monthly breakdown of your tweet impressions, tweets, followers, profile visits, and tweets linking back 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 marketing strategy.

(Twitter – Tweet activity)

More information: Twitter Analytics

YouTube Analytics

(YouTube Analytics)

YouTube Analytics provides analytics to video publishers.

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

To learn more, visit this site: YouTube Analytics

Pinterest Analytics

(Pinterest Analytics)

Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. You can get data about your audience so you can learn what they want more of.

Go here for more details: Pinterest Analytics

Additional Social Media Web 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 applications. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.

Wunderlist

A task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional to-do lists and share your lists with colleagues, friends and family.

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 allows users to ask questions, browse 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. 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. The software provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can schedule and publish updates, access metrics and KPI, follow conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.

Bambuser

Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your blog or favorite social network and engage with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.

BlogDash

BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the types of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.

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 part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action and participation.

CircleCount

CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google Plus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles in which you are included. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add your Google Plus profile and it will start tracking your circles.

Commun.it

Commun.it is a community management tool for building relationships and discovering leads on Twitter.

Contax.io

Contaxio 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

Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

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 facilitates the growth and spread of online communities through blog discussions. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.

Echofon

Echofon provides users with social apps for Facebook and Twitter. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. 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 simple, streamlined navigation and an uncluttered Facebook experience, 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

Meltwater 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 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 content, topics, 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 via 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

Know About It lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are collected from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the KnowAboutIt 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 social media monitoring tool for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.

ViralWoot

ViralWoot is a social media marketing tool that lets small and medium-sized business schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts on Pinterest. Multiple accounts can be added to the tool and you can view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. using built-in analytics reports.

TweetReach

TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, keywords, hashtags, and search queries are performing 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. Users can monitor their performance results using easy to understand visual reports.

Riffle

Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform (SocialEngage, Spredfast, Salesforce Desk, etc) 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 online merchants, bloggers, and consumers by tagging images on the web. You can earn money from every purchase made.

MutualMind

MutualMind provides 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 moments or trends 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 provides powerful tools designed to help you grow and manage your social media presence.

RetweetRank

Find out how influential are you on Twitter.

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 powerful social media analytics that tell you how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. 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 insights about your audience, and track your brand’s performance over the long term.

Synthesio

Synthesio is a social media intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global brands and agencies. Users can cut through the social noise, find conversations that matter, measure digital 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 that allow you to create better services and products 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 the audiences that matter to you.

ThisMoment

ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through various channels across the Enterprise.

Trackur

Trackur provides fast, affordable, and simple 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 one click of a button, teams can share content with their prospects, social networks, and customers.

Tweepi

Tweepi provides different ways to search for users that could have an interest in your brand. Once you find your targeted group of users, you can then easily interact with them by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter then notifies those users via mobile and email notifications, and if they are interested, they can check your profile and follow you back.

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, automate photo likes and direct messaging, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.

Twellow

Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search dozens of relevant 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, Instagram and YouTube 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 Twitter users view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.

Wajam

Wajam is a tool that gives you search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.

Addict-o-matic

Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic.

Bitly

Bitly lets you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.

MyTopTweet

My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that shows your top 10 performing tweets.

SocialMention

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

Twazzup

Twazzup provides real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.

TweetDeck

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

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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 tutorials we have published on this site.

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