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 look at a number of tracking tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to demographics, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Monitor social conversations online
- Identify consumer buying signals.
This information will allow you to start a meaningful conversation with consumers and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use for monitoring social media content. If you’ve been looking for ways to improve your business results with social media, then check out our list of more than 25 great social analytics tools and resources for tracking your social marketing ROI.
Great Social Media Resources For Business Owners
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, or your competitors on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, easy and simple way to find out what is new 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
(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 and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people, brands and companies, and monitor what other people write online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only useful for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically sourcing news about people, companies, and any subject you are following.
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, press release, news update, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
If you want to learn how to set up Google alerts, see this tutorial: A Quick Step-By-Step Tutorial On Setting Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. You 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 from the dashboard, and collaborate with team members.
Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks (including their app directory), and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here for more information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you.
You can schedule updates for a day, week, or month. Scheduling times are preset, but you can change these in your settings. In addition to a web interface, Buffer is also available as a web browser extension and as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
To learn more, visit this site: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(Social Metrics)
SocialMetricsPro is a plugin for WordPress that lets you track social activity across leading social media networks like Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Digg, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn.
Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetrics 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 SocialMetricsPro. Go here to learn more about this useful tool: Social Metrics Pro Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketer or business. You can easily schedule messages, manage your social networks, engage your audiences, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, royalty-free picture finder, smart inbox tool, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and more.
To learn more, go here: 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, social 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 to learn more: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that allows you to track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.
Social Report tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and displays data from your social channels on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by business or customers, 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 provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter on any profile data: bio, location, name, who they follow, etc., compare followers of other users to find overlaps and new audiences, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends, and explore and grow your social graph..
Go here to learn more: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of easy to use tools to empower you to work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort followers and following lists by a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, easily search inside your Twitter stream to find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out which inactive accounts you are following, and more.
For more information, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, community managers, content marketers, and online marketers. Beevolve lets you track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, sentiment, buzz, and more of all your posts.
Go here for more details: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social measuring service that allows you to monitor how your brand is mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics and gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing across those social media sites, and what aspects of your social marketing strategy can be improved.
For more information, go here: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention provides social media monitoring for all types of businesses, CEOs, marketers, agencies, etc..
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention offers apps for both desktop and mobile devices.
For more details, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that tools like Google Analytics can also help monitor posts made to your social accounts.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to read a great tutorial on how to track social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social media buttons to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your site is performing on the Facebook social networking platform.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
Facebook Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help you track active users. You can then use this data to improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have attracted the most shares, likes, and comments and to learn about your about your audience. You can then use this data to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.
More info: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a monthly break down of your tweets, tweet impressions, followers, profile views, and top 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 strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
Go here for more details: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the real-time, overview, engagement, revenue, and watch-time reports.
For more details, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. With Pin insights, you can get information that helps you learn who your audience is and what your customers want.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Web Applications
New tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses make sense of social media.
Here are some other social media services. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If anything changes in the list below, please contact us.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional lists and share your lists with family, friends 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 your customers.
Answerbase
Create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, browse 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 every stage of the content marketing lifecycle. 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 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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can publish and schedule updates, track conversations, access metrics and KPI, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your blog or favorite social network and interact with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands looking for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers who are willing to write content aimed at bringing brands positive media attention.
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 part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google Plus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add your Google+ 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 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 brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your marketing, customer service, and sales organizations..
Disqus
Disqus integrates with WordPress and can be used instead of the built-in WordPress commenting system to expand the power of social discussions online. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any 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 sharing media simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides real-time chat to quickly send and receive messages to any of your friends online, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post videos or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online via social collaboration.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which allows you to search Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, clients, or products using a blogger outreach tool that lets you search, sort, and filter to find and prioritize your blogger outreach based on which bloggers are active and building communities on popular social networks. GroupHigh makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on content, location, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a social media monitoring and performance analysis tool. Klout brings influencers and brands together, rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, 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
Know About It lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are gathered from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest users. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot is a social media marketing platform that lets small and medium-sized business schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts on Pinterest. 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. with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, keywords, hashtags, and search queries are doing on Twitter. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports with the estimated reach of your tweets based on various methods of measuring social performance.
Keyhole
Keyhole’s real-time dashboard shows how many people posted with your hashtag, along with the number of Retweets, Likes and Impressions your campaign is generating on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their performance results using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Twitter.com, Attensity, Salesforce Desk, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and social monitoring tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links online merchants, bloggers, and consumers by tagging images on the web. Approved users can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind is a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution gives you all the tools you 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 then, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated in the Unified Social operating platform. These tools form a complete marketing suite for top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow lets you find an audience, measure, manage, optimize and monetize 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 provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
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 Twitter and Facebook ads in one place, quickly identify your best content and top posting times, gain insights about your audience, and track long-term brand performance.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social media intelligence tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global agencies and brands. Users can cut through the 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 aimed at creating better services and products for your customers. Simply type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both historically and in real-time on any topic 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 your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, affordable, and fast social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Facebook, Twitter, 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 the click of a button, teams can share content with their prospects, customers, 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 lists.
Followadder
Followadder provides 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, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, create lists, search by hashtag, 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 relevant business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other service you use. You can quickly find out which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and lets Twitter users access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam gives you search results of what your friends are sharing above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
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 the WP CMS software to grow your business online, please see other tutorials we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum