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 tracking tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Monitor and listen to online social conversations
- Identify consumer buying signals.
This information will let you 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 technologies you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you are looking for smarter ways to improve your business results with social media, then here are dozens of social analytics tools for improving social marketing.
WordPress And Social Media – Useful Social Measurement Resources
(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 and simple way to access information about 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
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
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 and companies, and monitor what other people are saying about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for sourcing information about people, brands, companies, or any subject you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing robots crawl a new web page, press release, news update, blog post, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
To learn how to set up Google alerts, see this tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts - 3 Simple Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
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, 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, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here for more info: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will then automatically post the content 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 the web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
Go here to learn more: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(Social Metrics Pro)
Social Metrics is a plugin for WordPress that tracks social activity from many leading social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Digg, and LinkedIn.
Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetricsPro 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.
We have written a detailed article about SocialMetrics. For more info, see this article: SocialMetrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketer or business. You can easily manage your social media networks, schedule messages, engage with audiences, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: image-sharing designs, viral video finder and posting tool, advanced link share customization for Facebook, unlimited social account management (agency license), and much more.
More information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
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, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management tool that allows you to 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 data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize your data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
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, sort and compare followers, match your activities to gains and losses in followers to give your followers what they like best, discover who your most important, influential followers are, where they are located, when do they tweet, hone your social graph by following and unfollowing users, etc.
More info: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with a set of easy to use tools that empowers 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, find out which inactive accounts you follow, and more.
For more details, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve is a social monitoring platform designed for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, community managers, online marketers, and content marketers. It allows you to track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, buzz, social sentiment, etc. of posts.
For more information, visit this website: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring tool that allows you to see how brands or businesses are mentioned on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics and delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on those social media sites, and which sites can be improved.
To learn more, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention can help businesses monitor the web.
Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your business online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows you to collaborate with different team members.
Visit this site to learn more: 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 also help you monitor posts made to your social media accounts.
Hootsuite has published a six-step tutorial on tracking social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add social media buttons to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This application lets you understand how your content is performing on the Facebook social platform.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
Facebook Page Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help analyze metrics like page likes, engagement, post reach, etc.. You can then use this data to improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about your about your audience. You can then use this information to publish relevant posts when your ideal audience is on Facebook.
More info: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a monthly break down of your followers, tweet impressions, top tweets, profile views, and 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 better plan your Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
Visit this site to learn more: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets you see how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can measure demographics, sources of traffic, views, how many minutes users watch videos, estimated earnings from playbacks, and more.
To learn more, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics lets you see what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. You can get information that helps you learn what your audiences want.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Applications
New tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
Here are some other social media-related worth knowing about. Keep in mind that new web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please contact us.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal lists and share your lists with colleagues, friends 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, 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. 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. Appinions enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can follow conversations, access metrics and KPI, publish and schedule updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your blog or favorite social network and engage with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands looking to promote their services and products with bloggers who are willing to write content designed to bring brands the positive media attention they are searching for.
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 action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a GooglePlus education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles following your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of 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 lets you track your followers and friends on Twitter and other social networks.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on 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 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 just about every 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 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 and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with images, videos, or sounds, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online using social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, clients, or products using a blogger outreach software 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 topics, location, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social 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 is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. The stories are gathered 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 Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing, management, and analytics tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results across the Pinterest network.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot is a social media marketing platform 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 the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for your keywords, hashtags, and search queries. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search tracking application that lets users track keywords, #hashtags, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Analytics are displayed in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Hootsuite, Shoutlet, Twilert, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, 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 links bloggers, consumers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. You 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 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
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 lets you see important key performance indicators such as the visibility of a page in social media.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand conversations, audiences, and competitors that matter to you across all social channels.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful 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 powerful 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 social noise, find 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 aimed at creating better products and services 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 gain valuable insights into the communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, fast, and simple 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 social networks, customers, and prospects.
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 a list.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated social networking Instagram 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, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search hundreds of relevant 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 lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other social 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 website that allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam gives you search results of what your friends are sharing 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 lets you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media 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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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)