In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen in on social conversations online
- Identify key buying signals.
This information will let you start a meaningful conversation with your audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you’ve been looking for better ways to increase sales with social media, then check out this list of 25+ great social analytics tools
for businesses and WordPress users.
Essential Media Tracking Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competition on social media)
Is there a simple and easy (and free) way to access information about what is new in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with the latest news about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people, brands and companies, and track what other people write online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only only a useful social media monitoring tool for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for gathering information about people, companies, and any other topic you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, news update, press release, blog post, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
If you need to learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: A Quick & Easy Tutorial On Setting Up Google Alerts
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from an easy to use dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. Users 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 collaborate with team members.
Hootsuite is one of the most used 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 social content. Add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will then automatically post it for you at spaced out intervals over the day.
Buffer allows you to 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 for Android and iOS devices and a web browser extension.
More info: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(Social Metrics WordPress Social Plugin)
SocialMetricsPro is a plugin for WordPress that tracks social activity from leading social networks like Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Digg, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn.
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 SEO improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article on SocialMetrics. For more details about this plugin: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and WordPress is time-consuming and to get all these tasks done usually requires using different applications, plugins, or tools. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one single dashboard with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster includes powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, royalty-free image finder, built-in reply to Facebook comments, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and more.
To learn more, visit this site: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a robust social media management tool aimed at 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, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here for more information: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that allows you to track and manage all of your social media accounts from one place.
Social Report tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns data from your social channels on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by customers or business, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
For more details, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze, 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.
For more information, go here: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of easy to use tools that empowers 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.
Go here to learn more: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool for SMBs, community managers, content marketers, online marketers, and analysts. It allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement and sales, buzz, social sentiment, etc. of all your posts.
Go here for more info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring service that lets you see brand mentions on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics on dozens of social media sites. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing across those social sites.
To learn more, 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’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention has developed apps for mobile and desktop users.
Visit this site to learn more: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful tools like Google Analytics can help you track your social media campaign links.
Hootsuite has published a 6-step guide on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you integrate follow, like, and share social media plugins and commenting features with your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you understand how your content is performing on Facebook’s social networking platform.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Page Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help analyze metrics like post reach, engagement, page likes, etc.. You can then use this information to improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most comments, shares, and likes and to learn about your user demographics. You can then use this information to publish content when your posts are most likely to reach your target audience.
For more information, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a break down of your profile visits, followers, tweets, tweet impressions, and top tweets linking back to you.
Twitter’s Analytics dashboard also provides you with useful information about your tweets in the form of Tweet highlights, allowing you to plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
To learn more, visit this site: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your YouTube channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, real time, earnings, watch-time, and engagement reports.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you see what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. You can use the information to improve the way you pin.
More information: Pinterest Analytics
Other 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 worth knowing about. Keep in mind that new 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. Create personal and professional task lists and share these lists with family, colleagues and friends.
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 your customers.
Answerbase
Create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, view Q&A content, and get their questions answered.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content. 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 “what should we write about?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat runs a powerful data analytics platform 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. Users can access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish updates, track conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your blog or favorite social network and engage with viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and 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 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 aimed at inspiring direct social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google Plus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles following your profile. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of 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 lets you track your friends and followers on Twitter and other social networks and manage relevant, real-time relationship data.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening on social media, and use that information to make informed business decisions.
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 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 viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links 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 and videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save moments 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 media search engine which allows you to search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, company, or products 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’s blog search makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on topics, content, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analysis tool. Klout rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, brings influencers and brands together, 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 is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. 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 KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you collect and manage content from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application for Pinterest. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results across the Pinterest network.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot helps you gain more Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a bookmarklet, track what people are pinning from your website, who is pinning the most and what images from your website are trending on Pinterest with pin alerts, track your Pinterest performance, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for search queries, hashtags, and keywords. TweetReach gives you the estimated potential of the tweets for any given query.
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. Analytic metrics are displayed to users in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Mention, Spredfast, Spinklr, 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, consumers, and online merchants 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 that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution provides all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments in the 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 are part of 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
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 easy social media analytics for all of your data in one place.
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 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 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 conversations that matter, measure digital 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 that allow you to create better products and services for your customers. Simply 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 and communities that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, fast, 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, teams can share content with their customers, prospects, and social networks.
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 users with automated social networking Instagram 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, 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 business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other social service you use. You can quickly learn which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based service that allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam gives you search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly can help you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring for Twitter.
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 the benefits of using the WP platform to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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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)