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 look at a number of tracking tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Monitor and listen to social conversations online
- Identify buying signals.
This information lets you start a meaningful conversation 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 content. If you’ve been looking for ways to increase sales using social media, then check out our list of 25+ social monitoring tools for better understanding your ideal audience.
WordPress And Social Media – Useful Tools For Monitoring Social Metrics
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, and your competitors on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, easy and simple way to find out what is happening in your industry or niche that would save you a massive 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 one of the easiest and most useful online tools available for keeping up-to-date with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and monitoring what is being written online about you and your business. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically sourcing news about people, companies, or any other subject you are following.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots index a new web page, news update, press release, blog post, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
If you want to learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this step-by-step tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform 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, monitor 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 leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks (including their app directory), and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
More info: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer account and it will be posted 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 using a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app.
More information: Buffer
Social Metrics
(Social Metrics WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin)
SocialMetrics is a plugin for WordPress that lets you monitor social signals from leading social networks like Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Digg, and StumbleUpon.
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 autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a detailed article on SocialMetricsPro here: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any marketing campaign. You can easily schedule post messages, engage your audiences, manage your social networks, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, Facebook fanpage search tool, built-in reply to Facebook comments, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and much more.
More info: 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 social Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
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 media accounts from one place.
Social Report tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns your social channel data on 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 lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze their tweeting habits, 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 information: 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 by a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, 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.
More info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool designed for small and medium sized businesses, online marketers, content marketers, community managers, and analysts. Beevolve allows you to track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement and sales, sentiment, buzz, etc. for your posts.
For more details, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you monitor brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics on dozens of social channels. It gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across social media sites, and what aspects of your marketing strategy can be improved.
More information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention provides media monitoring for businesses, marketers, CEOs, agencies, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on blogs, websites, news sites, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your business online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention can also be used for collaborative monitoring.
For more information, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that software tools like Google Analytics can also help track social media activities.
Hootsuite has published a great step-by-step tutorial 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 plugins to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your content is performing on Facebook’s platform.
(Facebook Insights)
The Facebook Page Insights dashboard can help you better understand metrics about how people are engaging with your Page. This can help you with your marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts have attracted the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about your the demographics of your audience. You can then use this data to publish more of the type of content that your audience is interested in reading.
Visit this website to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a breakdown of your followers, profile views, top tweets, tweet impressions, and top tweets linking back 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.com – Tweet activity)
Go here to learn more: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to publishers.
You can track sources of traffic, demographics, views, video viewing duration, estimated earnings from video playbacks, and more.
To learn more, visit this website: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you see what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. You can get data about your audience so you can learn what they want more of.
For more information, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Tools & Services
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 services. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional lists and share these 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 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, view Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content. You can optimize campaigns by quickly finding, tracking and connecting with opinion leaders who are most likely to influence a trend, idea, product or brand. 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 “what should we write about?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is 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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers can schedule and publish updates, monitor 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 favorite social network or blog and interact with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands looking to promote their services and products with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands positive media attention.
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 action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use GooglePlus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles in which you are included. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of 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, 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 followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that can help you decide when to follow back.
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 such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
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 integrates with WordPress and can be used instead of the built-in WordPress commenting system to expand the power of social discussions online. Millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with 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 or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with sounds, images, or videos, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on 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 media search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, company, or products using a blogger outreach tool that lets you search, sort, 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 content, topics, 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 users 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 KnowAboutIt system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you collect and manage content from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest analytics, marketing, and management tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot helps you gain Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a free bookmarklet, create pin alerts, track your Pinterest performance, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for your chosen keywords, hashtags, and search queries. 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. Analytic metrics are presented using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform (Sparkcentral, SocialFlow, MarketMeSuite, etc) 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 links bloggers, online merchants, and consumers by tagging images on the web. Users can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind provides a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. 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 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 with Unified Social’s operating platform. These tools are part of 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 provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand conversations, audiences, and competitors that matter to you across all social channels.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media stats that let you see 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 powerful 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 agencies and brands. Users can cut through social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure online 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 aimed at creating better services and products for your customers. Simply 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 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 different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, fast, and affordable 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 the click of a button, teams can share content with their customers, social networks, and prospects.
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 you with automated Instagram management software. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, schedule posts, follow/unfollow Instagram users, 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. You can search hundreds of business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other social service you use. Know which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets users on Twitter access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addictomatic 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 exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet displays your best 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 powerful 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 articles and tutorials we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)