In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of monitoring tools that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on online social conversations
- Identify buying signals.
This information will let 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 activity. If you are looking for better ways to increase sales using social media, then here are the top social media management tools and resources.
WordPress Social Media Monitoring – Useful Tools
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, simple and easy way to know what is happening in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with news and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and monitor what other people are saying online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only only a useful social media monitoring tool for managing your reputation online, but also for receiving information about people, brands, companies, and any subject you want to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots (Googlebot) index a new web site, press release, blog post, news update, 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.
If you want to learn how to set up Google alerts, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts In Three Simple Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, 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 a large number of social networks, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here to learn more: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer account 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 using a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.
For more details, go here: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics Pro Social Plugin For WordPress)
Social Metrics is a WordPress plugin that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WordPress Admin 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, 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 about this plugin: Social Metrics Pro WordPress Social Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your WordPress, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook accounts is time-consuming. To get all of these tasks done usually requires different applications, and tools, plugins. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single location.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful marketing and social features: professional image-sharing designs, the ability to spy on your competition, bulk content importing and scheduling, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and much more.
For more details, 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 social Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: 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 quickly and easily 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 Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that 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
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, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, easily search inside your Twitter stream to find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, clean up and manage who you follow, and more.
More information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social monitoring tool designed for small and medium sized businesses, community managers, content marketers, analysts, and online marketers. It lets you track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement, conversion, and sales ROI, buzz, sentiment, etc. for those posts.
To learn more, visit this website: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring service that allows you to monitor how your brand and business is mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on those social sites.
For more details, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention is built on a simple idea of allowing anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, 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 collaborative monitoring.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that software tools like Google Analytics can help you track social media campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a useful six-step guide that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social buttons to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This application lets you understand how your content is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
The Facebook Page Insights dashboard can be seen by any page administrators and can help you improve your business marketing efforts by allowing you to analyze page metrics like post reach, page likes, engagement, etc.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts have the most comments, likes, and shares and to learn about about your audience. You can then use this information to publish content when your content is most likely to reach your target audience.
For more information, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a break down of your tweet impressions, followers, profile visits, tweets, and tweets linking 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 Analytics – Tweet activity)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to publishers.
You can monitor demographics, sources of traffic, views, how many minutes users watch videos, earnings from playbacks, etc.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what Pins and boards people like most, what they save from your website, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin new content. You can get information that helps you learn who your audience is and what they want.
Go here for more information: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Web Applications
Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses make sense of social media.
Here are some other social media worth knowing about. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal task lists and share your lists with colleagues, friends and family.
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 online consumers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. 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. Appinions 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 content discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat runs 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. Customers can access metrics and KPI, follow conversations, publish and schedule updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your favorite social network or blog and engage with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the kinds of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.
BrandWatch
accurately tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your products or your market.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCount is a Google+ education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles following 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 influencers and customers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contax.io can be used to track your friends and followers on Twitter and other social networks and manage relevant, real-time relationship data.
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 lets you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening, then use that information to make better business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a social tool that aims to help 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 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 friends online, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post photos or 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, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Meltwater Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your products, clients, or company using a blogger outreach tool 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 location, topics, content, 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 users haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares change 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 KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot is a social media marketing tool that lets small and medium-sized business schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts on Pinterest. You can add multiple accounts and view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. with built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, search queries, keywords, and hashtags are performing 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. Analytic metrics are presented 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 social monitoring 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, consumers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. Users can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind provides a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution provides all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends in social 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 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 lets you find a targeted audience, measure, manage, optimize and maximize your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand conversations, competitors, and the audiences that matter to you across every social channel.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats 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 tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global agencies and brands. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.
Sysomos
Sysomos provides powerful social media analytics that lets 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 channels. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the audiences and 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 various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides fast, simple, and affordable social media monitoring and social analytics insights including trends, keyword discovery, automated sentiment analysis & influence scoring.
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 prospects, social networks, and customers.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides multiple ways to search for users that could be interested in your brand. Once you find your targeted group of users, you can then easily interact with them by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter then notifies those users via mobile notifications and email, and interested users may check your profile and follow back.
Followadder
Followadder provides you with automated social networking management tools. 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, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search hundreds of business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.
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 and any other social service you use. Learn which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based website that allows users on Twitter to access 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.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet shows your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.
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 other posts we have published on this site.
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