Category: WordPress Plugins

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 tracking tools that allow you to:

• Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographics, psychographics, etc.
• Monitor and listen in on online social conversations
• Identify key buying signals.

This information lets you start meaningful conversations with potential consumers and pitch them your message.

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 smarter ways to increase sales using social media, then here are 29 social media monitoring tools & resources for engaging with your target audience.

Great Social Media Monitoring Tools Every Business Owner Should Know About

(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, and your competition on social media)

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free and simple way to access information about what is happening in your industry or niche 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 a free, simple and useful tool for keeping up-to-date with the latest news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and monitoring what other people are publishing online about you and your business.

Google Alerts is not only only a great tool for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering news about people, companies, or any subject you need to know about.

With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, press release, news update, blog post, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.

We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to set up Google alerts here: Google Alerts – A Simple Step-By-Step Guide

Hootsuite

(Hootsuite.com)

Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social media 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, monitor conversations, quickly create and customize analytics reports, streamline workflows amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations, 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 (including their app directory), and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.

More information: Hootsuite

Buffer

(Buffer)

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

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 for Android and iOS devices and a web browser extension.

For more information, go here: Buffer

SocialMetricsPro

(SocialMetricsPro)

SocialMetricsPro is a plugin that lets you monitor Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.

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 search improvement system.

Go here if you would like to learn more about Social Metrics: Social Metrics Pro WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin

Sociocaster

(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)

Posting to Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, and Linkedin can be very time-consuming and to get all these tasks done usually requires different plugins, tools, or web applications. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single location with just a few clicks.

Sociocaster includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, social stream, responsive mobile user interface, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and more.

Go here for more info: 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 Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.

For more details, go here: SproutSocial

SocialReport

(SocialReport)

SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management solution 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 your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize your data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.

To learn more, go here: SocialReport

Followerwonk

(Followerwonk)

Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that 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, discover who your most important, influential followers are, where they are located, when do they tweet, hone your social graph by following and unfollowing users, etc.

Go here for more info: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics

ManageFlitter

(ManageFlitter)

ManageFlitter provides you with 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 influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, clean up and manage who you follow, and more.

Go here for more info: ManageFlitter

Beevolve

(Beevolve.com)

Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring platform for SMBs, community managers, online marketers, content marketers, and analysts. Beevolve lets you monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting conversion, sales, and engagement metrics, sentiment, social buzz, etc. of all posts from one platform.

Go here for more info: Beevolve

HowSociable

(HowSociable.com)

HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you monitor how your business and brand is mentioned across different social properties.

How Sociable displays brand viability metrics. It gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and which areas can be improved.

More info: HowSociable

Mention

(Mention)

Mention is built on a simple idea of allowing anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.

Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, 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 for collaborative monitoring (sharing alerts and assigning mentions to other team members), and is cross-device compatible.

Go here for more info: 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 tutorial that shows you how to track social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.

Facebook Insights

(Facebook)

Facebook not only lets you integrate share, like, and follow social media buttons and commenting features with your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.

(Facebook.com – Insights)

The Facebook Page Insights dashboard can be seen by any page administrators and can help improve your business marketing efforts by allowing you to better understand metrics about page performance.

You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about about your audience. You can then use this information to publish content when your content is most likely to reach your target audience.

Go here for more info: 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 Twitter strategy.

(Twitter – Tweet activity)

Visit this site to learn more: Twitter Analytics

YouTube Analytics

(YouTube)

YouTube Analytics lets users see how their channel is performing on YouTube.

You can monitor audience demographics, views, traffic sources, video viewing duration, total estimated earning from video playbacks, and more.

More information: YouTube Analytics

Pinterest Analytics

(Pinterest.com)

Pinterest Analytics lets you explore what people like from your profile, 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 they want.

More information: Pinterest Analytics

Other Social Media-Related 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.

Here are some other social media-related tools and services. 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

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

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 your customers.

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 get their questions answered.

Appinions

Appinions, makers of an influence analytics marketing platform built on patented natural language processing and social network analysis technology was acquired by ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content. 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. 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 “what should we write about?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.

ViralHeat

Viralheat is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can access metrics and KPI, monitor conversations, publish and schedule updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.

Bambuser

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

BlogDash

BlogDash connects brands looking for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers who are willing to write content designed to bring brands the positive attention they are looking for.

BrandWatch

accurately listen to conversations about your brand, your market, or your products.

Buzzflash

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

CircleCount

CircleCount is a Google+ education tool. 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, manage multiple profiles and schedule posts, and view Twitter analytics data.

Contax.io

Contax.io monitors your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that can help you decide when to follow back.

Conversocial

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

SocialStudio

Social Studio helps 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. Millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable use Disqus.

Echofon

Echofon provides users with full featured, clean 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 collaboration app for creatives. If you work with sounds, videos, or images, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.

Icerocket

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

GroupHigh

GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software that lets you filter, sort, and search to find and prioritize your blogger outreach based on which bloggers are active and building communities on popular social networks. GroupHigh makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on topics, location, content, and more.

Klout

Klout is a social media monitoring and performance analysis tool. Klout brings influencers and brands together, rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, 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 change your Klout Score.

KnowAboutIt

KnowAboutIt is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. 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 analytics, management, and marketing tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across Pinterest.

ViralWoot

Viralwoot helps you gain more Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, 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 lets you measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, search queries, and specific keywords. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports with the estimated reach of your tweets based on various methods of measuring performance.

Keyhole

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

Riffle

Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform (Hootsuite, Spredfast, Zendesk, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, and real-time activity 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, consumers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. Approved 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 users with all the tools they need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends in social 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 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 allowing top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.

Refollow

Refollow lets you find an audience, measure, manage, optimize and monetize your social media presence.

RetweetRank

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

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 lets you analyze and understand competitors, audiences, and conversations that matter to you across every social channel.

SocialBakers

SocialBakers delivers powerful social media analytics 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 Twitter and Facebook 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 intelligence tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of leading brands and agencies around the world. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure online reputation, manage consumer relationships and boost the ROI of their social activities.

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 both in real-time and historically on any topic across all social networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into the audiences that matter most to you.

ThisMoment

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

Trackur

Trackur provides fast, simple, and affordable social media monitoring.

TrapIt

Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, teams can share content with their prospects, social networks, and customers.

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 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, 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. You can search for Twitter followers in many business categories or search your geographical area.

TwentyFeet

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

TwitterFall

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

Wajam

Wajam gives you search results of what your friends are sharing online on top of your normal search results.

Addict-o-matic

Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.

Bitly

Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.

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 and analysis platform.

Twazzup

Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a powerful 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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