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 examine a number of tracking tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen to social conversations online
- Identify key buying signals.
This information lets you start a meaningful conversation with prospects 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’ve been looking for cost-effective ways to increase sales with social media, then check out this list of 25+ great social monitoring tools & resources.
Essential Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, and your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, simple and easy way to access information about what is happening in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Well, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most useful online tools available for keeping up-to-date with the latest news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and tracking what other people are publishing online about you and your business. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for sourcing the latest news about people, companies, or any subject 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) index a new web site, blog post, news update, press release, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: A Quick & Easy Guide On Setting Up Google Alerts
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social media activities from an easy to use dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. 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 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.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer account and it will be posted for you at spaced intervals.
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 web browser extension.
Go here for more info: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(SocialMetricsPro WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin)
SocialMetrics is a WordPress plugin that lets you monitor social activity from leading social networks like Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetricsPro 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 about SocialMetricsPro. Go here to learn more: SocialMetricsPro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your Twitter, WordPress, Linkedin, and Facebook accounts is time-consuming and to get all these tasks done usually requires different software, plugins, and web apps. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single dashboard.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: built-in image-sharing templates, Facebook fanpage finder, built-in likes, favorites, retweets, and comments checker, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and more.
To learn more, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a robust tool aimed at small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in CRM, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Visit this website to learn more: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
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.
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 quickly and easily organize your data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
To learn more, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, breakdown your followers by social authority, tweet count, follower count, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
To learn more, go here: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of powerful tools that help you work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort your followers and following lists using 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 influencers 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)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool designed for small and medium sized businesses, community managers, analysts, online marketers, and content marketers. It lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement and sales, social buzz, sentiment, etc. of all your posts from a single platform.
To learn more, visit this website: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to see how your brand is mentioned across different social media properties.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics on more than 30 social media sites and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and what aspects of your marketing campaigns can be improved.
Go here for more details: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention helps businesses monitor the web.
Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have the ability to detect this, and access to intelligent, 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 information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only a great analytics software application that reports unique page views and view duration, website traffic, visitor behavior, your website’s best performing links, etc., it can also track posts made from your WP website to your social media accounts.
Hootsuite has published a six-step guide on tracking your social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add social media buttons to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help track active users. 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 about your audience. You can then use this information to publish content when your content is most likely to reach more targeted people.
To learn more, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a break down of your tweet impressions, followers, profile views, tweets, and top 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 better plan your Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
Go here for more information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to video publishers.
You can see sources of traffic, views, demographics, estimated revenue from playbacks, how long users watch videos, and more.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, what devices people are using, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. You can use the information to improve the way you pin.
More information: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Services And Tools
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 worth knowing about. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal to-do 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
Create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, view Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content. Marketers can optimize their campaigns by quickly finding, tracking and connecting with opinion leaders who are most likely to influence a trend, idea, product or brand. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. This tool provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content more easily discoverable?”, 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. Users can access metrics and KPI, publish and schedule updates, track conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your blog or favorite social network and engage with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands looking for ways to promote their products and services with bloggers willing to write content designed to bring brands positive media attention.
BrandWatch
accurately listen to conversations about your brand, your products or your market.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of your Google Plus profile and it will start tracking your circles.
Commun.it
Commun.it lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on influencers and customers, manage multiple profiles and schedule posts, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contaxio can be used to track your friends and followers on Twitter and other social networks.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your customer service, sales organizations, and marketing..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that facilitates the growth and spread of online communities through blog comments and discussions. 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 viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides real-time chat that lets you 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 lets you search Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software that lets you filter, search, and sort to find and prioritize your blogger outreach based on which bloggers are active and building communities on popular social networks. GroupHigh’s blog search makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on location, content, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, brings influencers and brands together, and ranks users 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 is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. The stories are collected from the Know About It system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre provides users with a real-time content marketing platform that lets you engage your audience, leverage native and social user-generated content surrounding your brand, and curate Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest management, marketing, and analytics tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot is a Pinterest-based social media marketing tool for small and medium-sized businesses. Multiple accounts can be added to the tool and you can view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. using the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for your chosen keywords, searches, and hashtags. TweetReach gives you the estimated potential of the tweets for your 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. Users can view their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and real-time tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links consumers, bloggers, and online merchants 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 for conducting social business One web-based solution provides users with all the tools they need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments in the data and instantly route insights back to the enterprise.
Unified Social / PageLevel
PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, was acquired by Unified Social in January 2013. Since being acquired, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated in the Unified Social 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 makes it easy to discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.
RetweetRank
Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.
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 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 of your Twitter and Facebook 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 intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of agencies and leading brands around the world. Users can cut through the social noise, listen into 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 aimed at creating 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. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and get insights into the audiences and communities that matter most 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 affordable, simple, and fast social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many more.
TrapIt
Trapit is lets you easily support your sales enablement, social selling, and employee advocacy efforts by providing relevant content to your employees. With one click of a button, your teams can share content with their customers, prospects, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides a number of different ways of searching for users that could be interested in your brand. Once you find 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 notifications and email, and interested users can check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated Instagram management software. 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. You can search hundreds of relevant business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other service you use. You can quickly learn which of your tweets, posts, photos, or videos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based service that allows Twitter users to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results of what your friends are sharing online above your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet shows 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 powerful 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 WordPress to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya
The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged social community around your company, products, and brand.
