In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of monitoring tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen in on social conversations online
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can start 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 you can use to monitor social media content. If you’ve been searching for smarter ways to increase sales using social media, then here are the top social monitoring tools for businesses and WordPress users.
WordPress And Social Media – Useful Resources For Tracking Social Activities
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, and your competitors on social media)
Is there a free, simple and easy way to know what is new in your industry or niche that can save you time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is a free, simple and useful tool for keeping up with news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what other people are posting online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for sourcing the latest news about people, brands, companies, or any topic you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing robots crawl a new web page, blog post, press release, news update, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: Google Alerts – A Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social profiles from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, create and customize analytics reports, share the workload amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations, and collaborate with team members.
Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many social networks, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
More info: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will then 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 the web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.
For more details, go here: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetrics Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress)
Social Metrics Pro is a plugin that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetrics include Excel-like conditional formatting, built-in and external widgets, sort, search and filter data, export data capabilities, 1-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article about Social Metrics. To learn more about this useful tool go here: Social Metrics Pro Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, and Linkedin can be very time-consuming. To get all these tasks done you usually need to use different plugins, tools, and web applications. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single dashboard.
Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: built-in image-sharing templates, social stream, smart inbox tool, unlimited social account management (agency license), and much more.
Go here for more details: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a robust tool aimed at small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in social CRM, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
For more information, 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.
It tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
Go here for more details: 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..
For more details, go here: Followerwonk
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 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, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.
To learn more, visit this website: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve is a social media monitoring tool for SMBs, analysts, community managers, content marketers, and online marketers. It lets you track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement and sales, social sentiment, buzz, etc. of posts.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you see brand mentions on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics on more than 35 social sites. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
Go here for more info: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for every kind of business, marketers, agencies, CEOs, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on news, blogs, websites, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in real time.
Mention uses algorithms that take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention offers apps for both desktop and mobile users.
Go here for more information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just a web analytics application used for monitoring visitor behavior, web page views, web traffic, where visitors are departing your site from, etc., it can also help you monitor posts made to your social media sites.
Hootsuite has published a great six-step guide that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add social buttons to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your content is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Insights can help you track the number of active users on your page. This can help you improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most shares, likes, and comments and to learn about your about your audience. You can then use this information to publish content when your posts are most likely to reach more targeted people.
For more information, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a break down of your followers, tweets, profile visits, tweet impressions, and 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.com – Tweet activity)
More info: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics lets you better understand how your channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can monitor the performance of your YouTube channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the realtime, overview, engagement, revenue, and watch-time reports.
To learn more, visit this site: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. You can get data about your audience so you can learn what they want more of.
More information: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Applications
New tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related tools and services. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. 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 personal and professional task lists and share these lists with friends, colleagues and family.
SDL/Alterian
SDL Web (formerly Alterian) is an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, view 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 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. 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 is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat runs a powerful data analytics tool 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, access metrics and KPI, publish and schedule updates, 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 your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers 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 allows you to collect, analyze and report on your social media data.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a Google Plus education resource. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles in which you are included. 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 lets you track your followers and friends on Twitter and other social networks.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on channels like 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 sales organizations, customer service, 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. 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 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 photos and videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with images, videos, or audio, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
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
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach tool 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 topics, content, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a 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 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 gathered from the KnowAboutIt system from the past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
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 Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across the Pinterest network.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a social media marketing platform that lets business using Pinterest schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts. You can add multiple accounts and view the performance of your pins using built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, search queries, hashtags, and keywords are doing on Twitter. 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 view their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, 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 lets you link consumers, online merchants, 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 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 trends or moments 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 being acquired, 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 provides powerful tools designed to grow and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
RetweetRank lets you get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics lets you see important key performance indicators such as the visibility of a page in social media.
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 social noise, listen into 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 both historically and in real-time on any topic across all social channels. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and get insights into the communities that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment allows businesses to engage with everyone, everywhere. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, simple, 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 one click of a button, your 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 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, 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 for Twitter followers in hundreds of relevant business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other service you use. You can quickly find out which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based service that allows Twitter users to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet displays your top 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 tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.
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We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about using WordPress to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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