In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of tracking tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on social conversations online
- Identify key buying signals.
This information will allow you to engage in meaningful conversations 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 to monitor social media activity. If you are looking for ways to improve your business results using social media, then here are 30 social monitoring tools & resources for monitoring, tracking and improving your social ROI.
Media Tracking Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, 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 niche or industry that would save you a massive amount of time doing research? Well, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
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 and companies, and tracking what other people publish about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only useful for managing your reputation online, but also for 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 page, press release, news update, blog post, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on setting up alerts with Google here: How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, 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 information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will post it 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 using a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a web browser extension.
Go here for more details: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetricsPro Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress)
SocialMetrics is a plugin that tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WP Dashboard.
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, 1-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
To learn more about SocialMetricsPro, see this article: SocialMetrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for entrepreneurial marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketing campaign. You can easily manage your social media networks, schedule messages, engage with your audiences, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: image-sharing templates, popular Twitter topics discovery tool, responsive mobile UI, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and much more.
Go here to learn more: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
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 CRM, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here to learn more: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that allows you to 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 displays data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you search Twitter on any profile data: bio, location, name, who they follow, etc., breakdown your followers by social authority, tweet count, follower count, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
To learn more, visit this site: 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, search twitter bios to easily find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, manage follows and unfollows, and more.
To learn more, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, online marketers, community managers, and content marketers. Beevolve lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting conversion, sales, and engagement ROI, buzz, sentiment, and more of posts from one easy-to-use platform.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring tool that allows you to see brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics on dozens of social media channels and gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
More information: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention provides media monitoring for businesses, marketers, agencies, CEOs, etc..
Mention uses algorithms that take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have the ability to detect this, and access to intelligent, actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention has developed apps for both desktop and mobile devices.
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 applications like Google Analytics can also help track posts made from your WP website to your social media accounts.
Hootsuite has published a step-by-step tutorial on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics here.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you integrate share, like, and follow social buttons and commenting features with your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights helps you better understand metrics about how audiences are engaging with your Page to help you with your marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most shares, likes, and comments and to learn about user demographics. You can then use this information to publish targeted content when your ideal audience is on Facebook.
Go here to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a monthly break down of your followers, profile visits, tweets, tweet impressions, 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 plan your strategy for marketing Twitter.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
Go here for more details: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets users see how their channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can monitor views, traffic sources, visitor demographics, average video viewing time, estimated earnings from video playbacks, and more.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin new content. You can get data about your audience and learn what they want more of.
To learn more, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Services & 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.
Here are some other social media-related applications. Keep in mind that new web technologies change. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal to-do lists and share these lists with friends, family and colleagues.
SDL/Alterian
SDL Web (formerly Alterian) is an all-in-one global web experience management solution that allows you to create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Create social Q&A communities. 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 has been acquired by ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. 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. Appinions 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 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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can monitor conversations, schedule and publish updates, access metrics and KPI, 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 engage with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the kinds 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 that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. 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 Google+ 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 monitors your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail to help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment about your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and social media discussions on channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your customer service, marketing, and sales organizations..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that facilitates the growth and spread of online communities through blog comments and discussions. Millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with full featured, clean 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 simple, streamlined navigation and an uncluttered Facebook experience, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post videos and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online via social collaboration.
Icerocket
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 makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on location, content, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout brings influencers and brands together, rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, and ranks your social influence using a “Klout Score”. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your users haven’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 Know About It system from the past 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 management, analytics, and marketing tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results across the entire Pinterest network.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot is a Pinterest-based social media marketing platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Viralwoot lets you view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. using the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, search queries, keywords, and hashtags are performing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for any given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search tracking application that lets users track URLs, hashtags, and keywords on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic results are displayed using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, interest, and real-time social monitoring tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links consumers, bloggers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. 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 the data and instantly route insights back to the enterprise.
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 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
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 deep, competitive social media stats that tell you how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. 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 your brand’s performance over the long term.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social media intelligence tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global brands and agencies. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure their online 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 both historically and in real-time on any topic across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and get 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 to find, mix and share a variety of content through various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, affordable, and fast social media monitoring.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With one click of a button, teams can share content with their social networks, prospects, 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 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
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search for Twitter followers in many business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other social service you use. You can quickly know which of your tweets, posts, photos, or videos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows Twitter users to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly can help you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring 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 the WordPress CMS software to grow your business online, please see other posts 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)