In Part One 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 monitoring tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on social conversations online
- Identify consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can start meaningful conversations with your audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies you can use to monitor social media activity. If you are searching for smarter ways to increase sales using social media, then here are 25+ cost-effective social monitoring tools for understanding and engaging with your customers.
Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress
(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 know what is happening in your niche or industry that would save you time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most useful online tools available for keeping up with the latest news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what is being said about you and your business online. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only only a useful social media monitoring tool for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically receiving news about people, companies, or any other topic you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots index a new web site, press release, blog post, news update, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
If you would like to learn how to set up Google alerts, see this simple step-by-step 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 profiles from an easy to use dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. Users 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, and add employees and clients to teams without sharing passwords.
Hootsuite is one of the leading 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.
To learn more, visit this website: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and it will be posted for you at spaced intervals.
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 for iOS and Android devices and a web browser extension.
Go here for more info: Buffer
Social Metrics
(Social Metrics WordPress Social Plugin)
SocialMetrics is a plugin for WordPress that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WP 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, 1-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
To learn more about SocialMetrics, refer to this article: Social Metrics Pro Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for entrepreneurial marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any marketing campaign. You can easily engage with audiences, schedule messages, manage your social media networks, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, viral video finder, bulk content importing & scheduling, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and much more.
More information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a robust social media management tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in social CRM, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management and reporting tool that lets you 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 returns your social channel data on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
Go here for 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 Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
More info: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of powerful tools that help you work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort your 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, clean up and manage who you follow, and more.
To learn more, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool for small and medium sized businesses, online marketers, community managers, content marketers, and analysts. It lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, buzz, social sentiment, etc. of all posts from one platform.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring service that allows you to monitor how business and brands are mentioned across different social media properties.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics on 36 social media sites. It gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
To learn more, go here: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention helps any type of business monitor the web.
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your business online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
For more details, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only an analytics application used for tracking and reporting page view duration, website traffic, visitor behaviour, what key phrases web visitors are searching for online, etc., it can also help you monitor posts made to your social media sites.
Visit the Hootsuite blog for a 6-step guide on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you integrate like, follow, and share social media buttons and commenting features with your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This application lets you analyze how your site is performing on the Facebook social networking platform.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Page Insights can be seen by all the page administrators and can help you with your marketing efforts by allowing you to better understand metrics about page performance.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts have attracted the most shares, comments, and likes and to learn about user demographics. You can then use this data to create more of the type of content that your audience is interested in.
To learn more, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a break down of your followers, top tweets, profile views, tweet impressions, and 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 plan your strategy for Twitter.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
To learn more, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets video publishers better understand 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 overview, real time, earnings, engagement, and watch-time reports.
Go here for more info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics lets you see what Pins and boards people like most, what they save from your website, what referral traffic you are getting from Pinterest, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin new content. With Pin insights, you can get information that helps you learn what your audiences want.
For more details, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Tools & Services
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.
Here are some other social media-related 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 these lists with family, colleagues and friends.
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
Create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, view Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content. Appinions’ technology allows customers to optimize every stage of the content marketing lifecycle. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. This tool provides answers to content marketers’ questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content discoverable?”, 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers can access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish updates, monitor conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your blog or favorite social network and engage with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands looking for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive attention they are searching for.
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 aimed at inspiring direct social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus 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 customers and influencers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and view Twitter analytics data.
Contax.io
Contaxio allows you 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 brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening, and use that information to make better business decisions.
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. Millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Facebook and Twitter. 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 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 photos or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, privately or publicly, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social 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 products, clients, or company using a blogger outreach tool that lets you search, filter, 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, content, topics, 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 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 past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the KnowAboutIt 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 Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application designed specifically for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, 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. Multiple accounts can be added to the tool and you can view the performance of your pins with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, hashtags, search queries, and keywords are performing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for any given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search tracking tool that lets users track #hashtags, keywords, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their performance results using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with 16 Twitter platforms (Hootsuite, Attensity, Lithium, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, and real-time 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 online merchants, consumers, and bloggers by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. Users 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 social 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 then, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated in the Unified Social 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 an audience, measure 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, competitors, and the audiences that matter to you across all social channels.
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 and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of leading brands and agencies around the globe. Users can cut through the social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage consumer relationships and boost the ROI of their social activities.
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 in real-time and historically across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the audiences and communities that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through many 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 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, teams can share content with their prospects, social networks, and customers.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides different ways of searching for users that could have an interest 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 notifies those users via mobile notifications and email, and if they are interested, they can check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated Instagram 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
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 can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other service you use. Discover which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows Twitter users to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results of what your friends are sharing on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
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 shows your best 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.
***
We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP software to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
***
"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)