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 tracking tools that let you:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, psychographics, etc.
- Listen to social conversations online
- Identify buying signals.
With this information, you can start meaningful conversations with potential consumers and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies you can use to monitor social media activity. If you are looking for better ways to increase sales using social media, then here are the best social media analytics tools & resources
for businesses and WordPress users.
WordPress Tools For Social Media Monitoring
(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 and simple way to access information about what is new in your niche or industry that would save you a massive amount of time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
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. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering news about people, brands, companies, and any other topic you are following.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing bots crawl a new web page, blog post, press release, news update, a tweet, video, or any other content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: How To Set Up Google Alerts In Three Easy Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, quickly create and customize analytics reports, share the workload 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 many social networks, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
For more information, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer account 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 using a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.
Go here for more info: Buffer
Social Metrics
(SocialMetrics)
SocialMetrics is a WordPress 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, one-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article on Social Metrics Pro. Go here to learn more about this useful tool: Social Metrics Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Posting to your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and WordPress accounts can be very time-consuming and to get all these tasks done usually requires different plugins, tools, or web applications. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one dashboard.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, royalty-free picture search tool, opt-in marketing tool, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and much more.
To learn more, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium 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, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here for more info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management and reporting 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, 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 customers or business, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
Go here for more information: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
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.
Go here for more information: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with a set of easy to use tools that empowers 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, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.
Go here for more info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve is a social monitoring platform designed for small and medium sized businesses, online marketers, community managers, analysts, and content marketers. It lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, buzz, sentiment, etc. for those posts.
To learn more, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring tool that allows you to monitor how your brand and business is mentioned across various social media platforms.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics. It gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across those social sites, and what aspects of your social marketing campaigns can be improved.
Visit this site to learn more: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention is a social monitoring tool for all kinds of businesses, agencies, marketers, CEOs, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on websites, news sites, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, 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 you to collaborate with other team members.
Go here for more details: 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 links posted from your WP blog to your social campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a useful tutorial that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics here.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you integrate share, follow, and like social media buttons and commenting features with your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights lets you understand how your content is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Insights can help you analyze metrics like post reach, engagement, page likes, etc. This helps you with your business marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have attracted the most comments, shares, and likes and to learn about your user demographics. You can then use this information to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.
More info: 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, tweet impressions, tweets, 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 Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
To learn more, visit this website: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to publishers.
You can track sources of traffic, demographics, views, how long users watch videos, total estimated earning from video playbacks, and more.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore what Pins and boards people like most, what they save from your website, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. You can use the data to improve the way you pin.
More information: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Services & Web Applications
Many 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. Keep in mind that new web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional task lists and share these lists with colleagues, friends 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
Create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, view Q&A content, and get their questions answered.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute 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. This tool provides answers to questions like “what should we write about?”, “where should we publish?”, 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers can access metrics and KPI, follow conversations, publish and schedule updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
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 kinds of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch is a social media monitoring platform that lets marketers capture, analyze and share insights from social data to better evaluate the value of marketing social.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a GooglePlus education resource. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles in which you are included. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add your GooglePlus 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 is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks 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 discussions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
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 is a free service that connects people online through blog comments and discussions. Millions of websites covering just about every 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 videos or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with images, videos, or sounds, you can save any moment 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 search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, products, or clients using a blogger outreach software that lets you sort, search, 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 location, topics, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and 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 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
KnowAboutIt 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 previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across the Pinterest network.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot is a social media marketing tool that lets small and medium-sized business schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts on Pinterest. Viralwoot lets you view the performance of your boards and pins with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, hashtags, keywords, and search queries are doing on Twitter. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports with the estimated reach of your tweets based on various methods of measuring social performance.
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 performance metrics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform (SocialEngage, TweetDeck, Salesforce Desk, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, 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, bloggers, and consumers 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 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
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 in the Unified Social operating platform. These tools form a complete marketing suite for top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow provides powerful tools designed to help you grow and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
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 provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive 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 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 intelligence 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 their 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 aimed at creating better services and products for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying on any topic both historically and in real-time across all social channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the audiences that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides fast, simple, and affordable social media monitoring and social analytics insights including trends, keyword discovery, automated sentiment analysis & influence scoring.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, your 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 a list.
Followadder
Followadder provides you with automated social networking Instagram management tools. 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, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search for Twitter followers in dozens of relevant business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other service you use. Know which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly can help you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet displays your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
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 the WP software to grow your business online, please see other 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)