In Part 1 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 that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to demographic criteria, their interests, 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 your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use for monitoring social media content. If you are looking for better ways to increase sales using social media, then here are more than 25 free or cost-effective social media management tools for helping you gain a better understanding of your ideal audience.
30 Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress Users
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, and your competition on social media)
Is there a free and simple way to access information about what is new in your industry or niche that will save you time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up with news about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people, brands and companies, and monitor what other people write about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically receiving news about people, brands, companies, and any other subject you need to know about.
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, press release, blog post, news update, a tweet, video, or any other content related to that topic, 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 A Google Alert - Three Quick And Easy Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social profiles from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, create and customize analytics reports, share the workload amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations from the dashboard, and add employees and clients to teams without sharing passwords.
Hootsuite is one of the most used social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many social networks, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here to learn more: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will then post the content 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 a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
To learn more, go here: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(SocialMetrics)
Social Metrics Pro is a WordPress plugin that monitors social signals across leading social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Digg.
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 autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a detailed article on Social Metrics. If you are interested in learning more about this useful tool go here: Social Metrics Pro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Posting to WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin is time-consuming. To get all these tasks done you usually need to use different software, plugins, or web applications. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single dashboard.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, the ability to spy on your competition, built-in bookmarklet, unlimited social account management (agency license), and more.
Go here for more details: 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 social Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here to learn more: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
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, website performance and blogs, and displays your social channel data on 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.
Go here for more information: 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, 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 details: 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 using 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.
For more details, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform designed for SMBs, analysts, online marketers, community managers, and content marketers. Beevolve lets you track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement, sales, and conversion ROI, sentiment, buzz, and more of all posts.
Go here to learn more: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to monitor brand mentions on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics on 36 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.
For more details, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
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 brand online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows you to collaborate with different team members.
Visit this website for more details: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only a web analytics application, it can also track social media campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a great 6-step tutorial that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add social buttons to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This application lets you see how your site is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
The Facebook Insights dashboard can be viewed by any page administrators and can help you improve your marketing efforts by allowing you to better understand metrics about page performance.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about audience demographics. You can then use this data to publish content when your posts are most likely to reach your target audience.
Visit this website to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a break down of your tweets, followers, tweet impressions, profile visits, and tweets linking 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 strategy for marketing Twitter.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
More info: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets you better understand how your channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the realtime, overview, watch-time, revenue, and engagement reports.
To learn more, visit this site: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
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 information that helps you learn who your audience is and what your customers want.
Go here for more info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Services & Web 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 applications. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. 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 professional and personal lists and share your lists with family, colleagues and friends.
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 online consumers.
Answerbase
Create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse 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 that lets you plan, create and distribute content online. 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. Appinions enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat (formerly ArgyleSocial – a social media marketing platform for marketers) is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. 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 follow conversations, access metrics and KPI, 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 engage with viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands looking to promote their products and services with bloggers who are willing to write content designed to bring brands the positive attention they are looking for.
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 an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use GooglePlus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles in which you are included. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add your Google Plus 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
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve 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 lets 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 Twitter and Facebook. 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 real-time chat to quickly send and receive messages to any of your online friends, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post photos or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with sounds, videos, or images, you can save any moment 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 media search engine which lets you search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, products, or company using a blogger outreach tool 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 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 using the “Klout Score”, which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your friends, fans, and followers 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 collected from the KnowAboutIt 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 marketing, analytics, and management tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across the Pinterest network.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot is a Pinterest-based social media marketing platform for small and medium-sized businesses. ViralWoot lets you view the performance of your boards and pins with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for keywords, search queries, and hashtags. 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 view their performance metrics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Hootsuite, Spredfast, Twilert, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, and 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, online merchants, and consumers 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 is a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. 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 being acquired, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated in the Unified Social 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 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 easy social media analytics for all of your data in a single place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media analytics that tell you 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 long-term brand performance.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social media intelligence and social listening 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 online reputation, manage their 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 aimed at creating better services and products 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 channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into the communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, affordable, and fast social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Twitter, Google+, Facebook and many more.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With one click of a button, teams can share content with their prospects, social networks, and customers.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides a number of different ways to search for users that might have an interest in your brand. After finding your targeted group of users, you can then easily interact with users by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter then notifies those users via mobile and email notifications, and interested users can check your profile and follow back.
Followadder
Followadder provides you with automated Instagram management tools. 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, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search for followers on Twitter in many 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 Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other social service you use. Learn which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and lets Twitter users access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that shows your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful 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 the WP CMS software to grow your business online, please see other tutorials and articles 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)