In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on online social conversations
- Identify consumer buying signals.
This information lets you start a meaningful conversation with buyers 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 looking for better ways to increase sales with social media, then here are more than 27 social media management tools for better understanding your ideal customers.
WordPress Resources For Media Monitoring
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, and your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple and easy way to access information about what is new in your niche or industry that would save you a massive amount of time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is 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 track what other people write about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only useful for managing your reputation online, but also for receiving news about people, brands, companies, or 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 indexing robots (Googlebot) crawl a new web page, press release, blog post, news update, a tweet, video, or any other content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: Google Alerts – A Quick Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from an intuitive dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, create and customize analytics reports, streamline workflows amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations from the dashboard, and collaborate with team members.
Hootsuite is one of the most used social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks (including their app directory), and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
For more information, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue 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 a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app.
For more information, go here: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(Social Metrics Pro)
Social Metrics Pro is a plugin for WordPress that tracks social signals across leading social networks like Twitter, Google+, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Digg, 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 autoupdate functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
Go here to learn more about Social Metrics: SocialMetrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, and Linkedin accounts can be very time-consuming. To get all of these tasks done usually requires different software, web applications, and plugins. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one location.
Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, royalty-free picture finder, built-in reply to Facebook comments, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and much more.
Go here for more info: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a robust tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in social CRM, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that lets you track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.
It tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and displays data from your social channels on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize your data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
For more details, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze their tweeting habits, track, sort and compare followers, match your activities to gains and losses in followers to give your followers what they like best, find and connect with new influencers in your niche, where they are located, when do they tweet, hone your social graph by following and unfollowing users, etc.
To learn more, visit this website: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with a set of easy to use tools to empower you to work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort your 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 the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.
For more information, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social monitoring tool for small and medium sized businesses, online marketers, content marketers, analysts, and community managers. It allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting conversion, sales, and engagement metrics, sentiment, buzz, and more of posts from one easy-to-use platform.
For more information, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring tool that allows you to monitor how brands are mentioned on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on those social media sites.
For more details, go here: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention provides social media monitoring for every type of business, marketers, CEOs, agencies, etc..
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 other team members.
Go here for more info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful software tools like Google Analytics can also help monitor social campaign links.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to view a simple 6-step tutorial on tracking your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you integrate like, share, and follow social buttons and commenting features with your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help track active users. You can then use this information to improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have the most shares, likes, and comments and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this data to publish more of the types of posts that your audience is interested in reading.
Visit this website to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a monthly breakdown of your top tweets, followers, profile views, tweet impressions, 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 strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
Go here for more info: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your YouTube channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the real-time, overview, engagement, watch-time, and revenue reports.
To learn more, visit this site: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, what referral traffic you are getting from Pinterest, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. You can use the data to improve the way you pin.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Web Applications
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 applications. 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
A task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal task lists and share your lists with friends, colleagues and family.
SDL/Alterian
SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you create engaging digital experiences with your customers.
Answerbase
Create social Q&A communities. 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’ technology enables customers to optimize every stage of the content marketing lifecycle. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to content marketers’ questions like “what should we write about?”, “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. Users can publish and schedule updates, access metrics and KPI, follow conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your favorite social network or blog and interact with viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands looking to promote their services and products with bloggers willing to write content designed to bring brands positive media attention.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch lets you tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your products or your market with pinpoint accuracy.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use GooglePlus. 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
Contax.io is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that can help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and social media discussions on channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you discover what consumers are saying about your brand, your products, and your competitors, and empower your team to plan, execute, and track compelling social media marketing..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog comments and discussions. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Facebook and Twitter. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. Echofon for Twitter automatically keeps unread tweets in sync between apps 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 and videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online with social collaboration.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, company, or products using a blogger outreach software 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’s blog search makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on content, topics, location, 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 change your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
Know About It 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 capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest analytics, management, and marketing tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot helps you gain more 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, track your Pinterest performance, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, hashtags, search queries, and keywords are doing on Twitter. TweetReach shows you the estimated potential of the tweets for any given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search tracking tool that allows you to track #hashtags, URLs, and keywords on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their performance results using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff 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 lets you link online merchants, consumers, and bloggers 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 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 trends or moments in social 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 then, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated with Unified Social’s operating platform. These tools are part of a complete marketing suite for top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow provides powerful tools designed to grow and manage your social media presence.
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 lets you analyze and understand conversations, the audiences, and competitors that matter to you across every social channel.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful 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 Twitter and Facebook 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 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, listen into the conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.
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. 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 get insights into the audiences that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, affordable, and fast social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Google+, Twitter, Facebook 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, teams can share content with their social networks, prospects, and customers.
Tweepi
With Tweepi, you can follow a @user’s followers, follow a @user’s friends, follow using a Twitter list, and follow by copy/pasting lists.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated social networking management software. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, schedule posts, follow/unfollow Instagram users, like back photos, automate photo likes and direct messaging, 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 for Twitter followers in hundreds 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 Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with 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 based in the UK and lets users on Twitter view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results of what your friends are sharing online on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly can help you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure exactly 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 engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
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We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress 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)