In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Monitor social conversations online
- Identify buying signals.
This information will allow you to start a meaningful conversation with a targeted audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use for monitoring social media content. If you are searching for cost-effective ways to increase sales using social media, then check out our list of 29 social media management tools
for WordPress users.
WordPress And Social Media Tracking
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, or your competition on social media)
Is there a free, simple and easy way to find out what is happening in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most useful tools available online for keeping up with news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and tracking what is being said 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 automatically sourcing news about people, companies, or any topic you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, news update, blog post, press release, a video, tweet, or any other 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 set up alerts with Google here: A Simple Step-By-Step Guide On Setting Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, quickly 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 teams.
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.
More info: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and it will be posted for you.
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 is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Go here for more details: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetrics)
SocialMetrics is a WordPress plugin that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WordPress Dashboard.
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, 1-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
Go here if you want to learn more SocialMetricsPro: Social Metrics Pro Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Posting to Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and WordPress is time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done usually requires different web applications, plugins, and tools. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one single dashboard with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, popular Twitter topics discovery tool, advanced link share customization for Facebook, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and much more.
For more information, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium social media management 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 for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
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 using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
Go here for more info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze their tweeting habits, track and sort 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 Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with a set of powerful tools that help you 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, understand who you follow, and more.
More information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool for SMBs, content marketers, community managers, analysts, and online marketers. Beevolve lets you track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement and sales, buzz, sentiment, and more of posts from a single platform.
Go here to learn more: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social media monitoring service that allows you to see how your brand or business is mentioned across various social properties.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on those social sites, and what areas can be improved.
For more information, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
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 business online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention can also be used for collaborative monitoring (e.g. sharing alerts with your team members), and is cross-device compatible.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just a web analytics software application, it can also help you track posts made to your social sites.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to read a step-by-step tutorial on how to track social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add share, follow, and like social plugins and commenting features to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights 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 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 have attracted the most shares, likes, and comments 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 your target audience.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a breakdown of your profile visits, followers, tweet impressions, top tweets, 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 better plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets users see how their channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the real time, overview, watch-time, engagement, and revenue reports.
To learn more, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, 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 new content. You can get data about your audiences and learn what your customers want.
For more details, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Applications
Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related applications. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. If anything changes in the list below, please contact us.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional lists and share these lists with family, friends and colleagues.
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
Answerbase lets you 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, makers of an influence analytics marketing platform built on patented natural language processing and social network analysis technology is now part of ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content online. Appinions’ technology enables 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 (formerly ArgyleSocial – a social media marketing platform for marketers) is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat is 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 track conversations, schedule and publish updates, 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 your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the kinds 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 part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action and participation.
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 GooglePlus profile and it will start tracking your circles.
Commun.it
Commun.it lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on customers and influencers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contax.io is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail to help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will never miss another comment about your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your marketing, sales organizations, and customer service..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog discussions. Millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Facebook and Twitter. 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 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 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 are then easy to share, privately or publicly, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Icerocket
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
GroupHigh is 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 topics, content, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence using 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 Know About It system from the past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the Know About It system is aware of in relation to that story.
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 social media monitoring application designed specifically for Pinterest users. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across Pinterest.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a social media marketing platform for small and medium sized businesses using Pinterest. ViralWoot lets you view the performance of your pins using the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, hashtags, search queries, and keywords are performing on Twitter. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring service that lets you track hashtags, keywords, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Users can view their performance results using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Twitter.com, SocialFlow, Twilert, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, 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 lets you link bloggers, online merchants, and consumers by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. You can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind provides 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 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 are part of a complete marketing suite for 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
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
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 the audiences, conversations, and competitors that matter to you across every social channel.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats that let you see 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 your brand’s performance over the long term.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social intelligence tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global brands and agencies. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure digital 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 services and products 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 that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment allows businesses to engage with everyone, everywhere. Depending on what business you run, 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 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 one click of a button, teams can share content with their prospects, social networks, 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 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, automate photo likes and direct messaging, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search many 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 Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other service you use. Know which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets Twitter users view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results of what your friends are sharing online above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly can help you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet displays 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 powerful tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.
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We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress web site management software to grow your business online, please see other articles and tutorials 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)