In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of monitoring tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, their interests, etc.
- Listen to social conversations online
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can start a meaningful conversation with your 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’ve been looking for better ways to improve your business results with social media, then here are 25+ free or cost-effective social monitoring tools
for businesses and WordPress users.
WordPress And Media Monitoring

(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free and simple way to find out what is happening in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Well, there is, and 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 tracking what is being written about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for gathering the latest news about people, companies, or any other subject you are following.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots (Googlebot) 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 simple step-by-step tutorial: How To Set Up A Google Alert – A Simple And Easy Step-By-Step Tutorial
Hootsuite

(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, 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, 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 information: Hootsuite
Buffer

(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you.
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 the web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps for Android and iOS devices and a browser extension.
More information: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(Social Metrics Pro WordPress Social Analytics Plugin)
Social Metrics Pro is a plugin that lets you track 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, one-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article about SocialMetricsPro. To learn more, go here: SocialMetricsPro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to WordPress, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook can be very time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done you usually need to use different applications, and tools, plugins. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single dashboard.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: professional image-sharing templates, social stream, advanced link share customization for Facebook, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and much more.
Go here for more information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial

(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a robust 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 for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: SproutSocial
SocialReport

(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management tool that allows you to track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.
It tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, website performance and blogs, and returns 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 provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, 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..
Go here for more info: Followerwonk
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, 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, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.
To learn more, visit this website: ManageFlitter
Beevolve

(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve is a social monitoring platform for SMBs, content marketers, community managers, analysts, and online marketers. It lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, social sentiment, buzz, etc. of posts from one easy-to-use platform.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable

(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring service that lets you monitor how brands are mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics on 30+ social sites. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
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 take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows collaborative monitoring.
To learn more, visit this site: Mention
Google Analytics

(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful, free tools like Google Analytics can also help you track posts made to your social media accounts.
Hootsuite has published a useful step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to track social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights

(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social buttons to your WordPress site for sharing, commenting, and linking social buttons and commenting features to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your site is performing on the Facebook social platform.

(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Insights can be accessed by any page administrators and can help you improve your business marketing efforts by allowing you to track the number of active users on your Page.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish more of the types of posts that your audience is interested in reading.
Visit this site to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics

(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a break down of your tweets, profile visits, followers, tweet impressions, and top tweets linking 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 Analytics – Tweet activity)
Visit this site to learn more: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics

(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to video publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, realtime, watch-time, earnings, and engagement reports.
For more details, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics

(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. With Pin insights, you can get data about your audience and learn what they want more of.
More information: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Tools
New tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses make sense 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 let us know.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional lists and share these lists with friends, colleagues 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 your customers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able 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 is now part of ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. Appinions’ deep data science patent protected technology allows customers to optimize all stages of the content marketing lifecycle. Appinions enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. This tool provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content discoverable?”, 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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers can follow conversations, publish and schedule updates, access metrics and KPI, 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 content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the types of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
accurately tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your products or your market.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles in which you are included. If your profile isn’t already being monitored 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, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and view Twitter analytics data.
Contax.io
Contaxio is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your friends and followers 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 discussions on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your customer service, sales organizations, and 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. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Facebook and Twitter. 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 sharing media simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides real-time chat that lets you quickly send and receive messages to any of your online friends, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post photos and videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online using social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Icerocket is a social search engine which lets you search Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your products, company, or clients using 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, content, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that helps you analyze user’s social media influence via 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 affect your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
KnowAboutIt lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are gathered 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 access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application for Pinterest users. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across Pinterest.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot is a social media marketing platform that lets business on Pinterest schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts. You can add multiple accounts and view the performance of your boards and pins using built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for your chosen keywords, searches, and hashtags. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.
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 analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and social monitoring 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, consumers, and bloggers 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 is a complete social data platform for conducting social business One web-based solution provides you with all the tools you 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 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 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, competitors, and audiences 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 wider industry benchmarks and the competition. You can create, manage, and optimize all your Twitter and Facebook ads in one place, quickly identify your best content and top posting times, gain 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 globe. Users can cut through the social noise, find conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage their 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 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 communities that matter 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 simple, affordable, and fast social media monitoring.
TrapIt
Trapit is lets you easily support your sales enablement, social selling, and employee advocacy efforts by providing relevant content to your employees. 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 automated social networking management tools. 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. You can search hundreds of business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other social service you use. Discover which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and allows Twitter users to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that gives you search results of what your friends are sharing on top of your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search 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 the benefits of using WordPress to grow your business online, please see other posts we have published on this site.

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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now











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