In Part 1 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 monitoring tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen to online social conversations
- Identify buying signals.
With this information, you can start a meaningful conversation with a targeted audience and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use to monitor social media content. If you’ve been searching for cost-effective ways to increase sales using social media, then here are the top social management tools for helping you gain a better understanding of your audience.
WordPress Social Media Monitoring Resources
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors 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 time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is one of the easiest and most useful tools available online for keeping up with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what other people are publishing online about you and your business. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only useful for managing your reputation online, but also for sourcing the latest news about people, brands, companies, or any other subject you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots (Googlebot) index a new web site, press release, news update, blog post, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
To learn how to set up Google alerts, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social media activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, 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 add employees and clients to teams without sharing passwords.
Hootsuite is one of the most used social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many 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 social content. 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 using a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a web browser extension.
To learn more, visit this site: Buffer
Social Metrics
(Social Metrics)
Social Metrics Pro is a plugin for WordPress that lets you monitor Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WordPress Admin Dashboard.
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 auto-update functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a detailed article on Social Metrics Pro here: SocialMetrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress accounts can be very time-consuming. To get all these tasks done usually requires using different plugins, software, and web applications. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one location.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, royalty-free image search tool, advanced link share customization for Facebook, unlimited social account management (agency license), and much more.
Go here for more details: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a premium tool built for 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, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here to learn more: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that lets you 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 displays your social channel data on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by customers or business, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
More information: 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, 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..
More info: 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 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.
Visit this website to learn more: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring tool designed for SMBs, content marketers, analysts, community managers, and online marketers. It allows you to monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement and sales, social sentiment, buzz, and more of all your posts from one platform.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social media monitoring service that lets you monitor brand mentions across various social media properties.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and what aspects of your social marketing strategy can be improved.
More info: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention helps any type of business monitor the web.
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows collaborative monitoring (assigning mentions to different team members and sharing alerts), and has developed apps for both desktop and mobile users.
More information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful and free applications like Google Analytics can help you track social media activities.
Hootsuite has published a simple step-by-step tutorial on tracking social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add social media plugins to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights lets you analyze how your site is performing on the Facebook platform.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights lets you analyze metrics like engagement, page likes, post reach, etc. to help improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have the most comments, likes, and shares and to learn about your about your audience. You can then use this information to publish more of the type of content that your audience is interested in reading.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a breakdown of your profile views, tweet impressions, tweets, followers, 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 plan your Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
For more details, visit this site: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to video publishers.
You can monitor demographics, views, sources of traffic, revenue from playbacks, average video viewing duration, etc.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
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 devices people are using, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin new content. 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 Services And Tools
With the explosive growth of social media predicted to continue rising, many new tools and technologies are being developed to help business engage and make sense of social data.
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.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional lists and share your lists with colleagues, family and friends.
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 online consumers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able 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 was acquired by ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content online. You can optimize 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. The software provides answers to content marketers’ questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content more easily discoverable?”, 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can track conversations, publish and schedule updates, access metrics and KPI, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and interact with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the types of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch allows you to listen to conversations about your brand, your market, or your products with pinpoint accuracy.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google Plus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add your Google+ profile and it will start tracking your circles.
Commun.it
Commun.it lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on influencers and customers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and view Twitter analytics data.
Contax.io
Contaxio can be used to track your followers and friends on Twitter and other social networks.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment about your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and discussions on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets 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 social tool that helps improve conversations online. Millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of 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 online friends, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post videos or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with images, videos, or audio, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which lets you search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, products, or clients using 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, topics, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a 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 audience hasn’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 past 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 Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing, management, and analytics tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results across Pinterest.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot is a Pinterest-based social media marketing tool for small and medium-sized businesses. You can add multiple accounts and view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. using built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for keywords, searches, and hashtags. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring service that allows users to track keywords, URLs, and #hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Users can monitor their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform (Hootsuite, Shoutlet, Salesforce Desk, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, and tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links bloggers, online merchants, and consumers by tagging images on the web. 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 all the tools you 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
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 for top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow lets you find an audience, measure, manage and maximize your social media presence.
RetweetRank
RetweetRank lets you get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand.
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 your data in a single place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media analytics 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 Facebook and Twitter ads in one place, quickly identify your best content and top posting times, gain powerful insights about your audience, and track your brand’s performance over the long term.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of leading brands and agencies around the world. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure their 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 products and services for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying on any topic both in real-time and historically across all social networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides fast, affordable, and simple social media monitoring.
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, 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 you with automated social networking management software. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, follow/unfollow Instagram users, schedule posts, 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 for followers on Twitter in many relevant 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 Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other service you use. You can quickly find out which of your posts, tweets, 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 other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that gives you search results of what your friends are sharing online above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.
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We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress platform to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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