In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress makes 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 allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, their interests, etc.
- Listen in on social conversations online
- Identify buying signals.
This information will let you 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 you can use for monitoring social media content. If you are searching for ways to improve your business results with social media, then here are the top social media monitoring tools for improving social marketing ROI.
WordPress Social Media Monitoring – Useful Resources
(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, simple and easy way to find out what is going on in your industry or niche that would save you 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 with the latest news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what other people say online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically receiving information about people, companies, or any topic you are following.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots crawl a new web site, 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 would like to learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: How To Set Up A Google Alert In 3 Simple Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from an easy to use dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, quickly 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 collaborate with teams.
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.
More information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted 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 a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a web browser extension.
More info: Buffer
Social Metrics
(Social Metrics Social Plugin For WordPress)
Social Metrics Pro is a plugin for WordPress that tracks social signals from leading social media networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Digg.
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 search improvement system.
We have written a detailed article on Social Metrics. Go here to learn more: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress accounts is time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done usually requires using different plugins, applications, or tools. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single location.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: professional image-sharing templates, viral video finder and posting tool, built-in likes, favorites, comments, and retweets checking tool, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and more.
More information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium 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, 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 tool that allows you to 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.
For more information, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that 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 details, 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 your followers and following lists by a range of criteria, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, search twitter bios to easily find and follow the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out who isn’t following you back, and more.
For more details, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring platform designed for small and medium sized businesses, community managers, online marketers, content marketers, and analysts. It allows you to track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales, conversion, and engagement metrics, buzz, sentiment, etc. for your posts from a single platform.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to see brand mentions across various social platforms.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics on 30+ social channels and gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing across social media sites.
Go here for more details: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention provides social media monitoring for every type of business, CEOs, marketers, agencies, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on websites, blogs, news sites, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in real time.
Mention’s algorithms 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 (assigning mentions to other team members and sharing alerts), and provides apps for mobile and desktop users.
To learn more, go here: 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 posts made from your website to your social media accounts.
Hootsuite has published a tutorial that shows you how to track social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add social media buttons to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This lets you analyze how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights tracks the number of active users to help you with your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about your user demographics. You can then use this data to publish targeted content when your ideal audience is on Facebook.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a break down of your tweet impressions, followers, profile views, top tweets, and tweets linking back 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.com – Tweet activity)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to video publishers.
You can track sources of traffic, views, demographics, earnings from video playbacks, video viewing duration, and more.
Visit this site to learn more: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. You can get information that helps you learn who your audience is and what they want.
For more information, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Services And Tools
Many 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 tools and services. Keep in mind that new web technologies continually evolve. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional lists and share these lists with friends, family and colleagues.
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, 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 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. Appinions enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is 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. 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 interact with your 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
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 social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a GooglePlus education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked 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
Contax.io can be used to track your followers and friends 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 customer experience and operational efficiency by managing the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening on social media, then use that information to make informed business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a social tool that aims to help improve conversations online. Millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Twitter and Facebook. 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 simple, streamlined navigation and an uncluttered Facebook experience, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post videos and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with images, sounds, or videos, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online via social collaboration.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, or all of these 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, filter, 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 location, content, topics, 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 friends, fans, and followers haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares affect 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 collected from the KnowAboutIt 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 collect and manage content from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot helps you grow Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a free 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, find which are your top performing boards and pins, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, hashtags, keywords, and search queries are doing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for any given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring application that lets users track #hashtags, keywords, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic results are presented using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform (Twitter.com, Spredfast, Lithium, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, and activity 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. 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 moments or trends 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 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 help you 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 easy social media analytics for all of your data in one place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive 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 Facebook and Twitter 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 intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global agencies and brands. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure their online 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 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 networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into 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 to find, mix and share a variety of content through different 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 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, your teams can share content with their social networks, prospects, and customers.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides multiple ways to search for users that might be interested in your brand. After finding your targeted group of users, you can easily interact with users by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter notifies those users via email and mobile notifications, and interested users may check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated 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
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search many relevant business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other social service you use. You can quickly find out which of your tweets, posts, 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 users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results based on what your friends share above 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 optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that shows your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
***
We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie