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 tracking tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, psychographics, etc.
- Listen to social conversations online
- Identify key buying signals.
With this information, you can engage in meaningful conversations with prospects online and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you are searching for cost-effective ways to improve your business results with social media, then check out our list of more than 25 free or cost-effective social management tools for monitoring, tracking and improving your social marketing campaigns.
Essential Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress Users
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, easy and simple way to know what is going on in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is one of the easiest and most useful tools available online for keeping up-to-date with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what is being published online about you and your business. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only useful for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically sourcing news about people, brands, companies, and any topic you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing bots crawl a new web page, news update, press release, blog post, 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 want to learn how to set up Google alerts, see this step-by-step tutorial: A Simple Guide On Setting Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social media activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor 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 collaborate with team members.
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 details: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will post the content 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 is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Visit this site to learn more: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetricsPro Social Plugin For WordPress)
Social Metrics Pro is a WordPress plugin that lets you track social activity from many leading social networks like Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon.
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 autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article on SocialMetricsPro. To learn more, go here: Social Metrics Pro Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketer or business. You can easily engage with audiences, schedule post messages, manage your social media networks, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: professional image-sharing design templates, social stream, built-in comments, favorites, likes, and retweets tool, unlimited social account management (agency license), and much more.
Visit this website to learn more: 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 Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, 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.
It 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 organize data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze, track and sort 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.
Go here for more information: 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 the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out which inactive accounts you are following, and more.
Go here to learn more: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social monitoring tool designed for small and medium sized businesses, community managers, online marketers, content marketers, and analysts. It allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure conversion, engagement, and sales metrics, sentiment, social buzz, and more of all posts from one easy-to-use platform.
To learn more, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social media monitoring tool that lets you monitor how your business or brand is mentioned across different social media properties.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics on 35+ social media sites. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
To learn more, go here: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention allows anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows you to collaborate with other team members.
To learn more, visit this site: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just an analytics tool used to measure and report unique web page views, visitor behavior, web traffic, where site visitors come from, etc., it can also monitor links posted from your website to your social media accounts.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to view a simple 6-step guide on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add follow, share, and like social media buttons and commenting features to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
Facebook Insights can be seen by all the page administrators and can help you with your business marketing efforts by allowing you to track the number of active users on your Page.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most shares, comments, and likes and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this data to publish targeted content to Facebook users.
For more details, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a breakdown of your followers, tweet impressions, 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 plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
To learn more, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets users see how their channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can monitor traffic sources, views, demographics, average video viewing time, estimated revenue from video playbacks, and more.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what Pins and boards people like most, what they save from your website, what devices people are using, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. With Pin insights, you can get data about your audience and learn what they want more of.
For more details, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related 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 tools. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional task 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 allows you to create engaging digital experiences with your customers.
Answerbase
Create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able 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’ deep data science patent protected 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. This tool provides answers to questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content more easily discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat runs a powerful data analytics application 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 schedule and publish updates, monitor conversations, 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 engage with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the kinds of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch is a social monitoring platform that helps marketers capture, analyze and share insights from social data to better prove the value of marketing social.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCount is a Google Plus education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles in which you are included. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of your Google Plus profile and it will start tracking your circles.
Commun.it
Commun.it lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on customers and influencers, manage multiple profiles and schedule posts, and view Twitter analytics data.
Contax.io
Contaxio monitors your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that helps you decide when to follow back.
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 Twitter, Facebook, 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, customer service, and sales organizations..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog comments and discussions. 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 messages and mentions. Echofon for Twitter automatically keeps unread tweets in sync between apps on different devices, makes sharing media simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides simple, streamlined navigation and an uncluttered Facebook experience, 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, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, company, or products using 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 location, content, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that helps you analyze user’s social media influence using the “Klout Score”, which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. 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
Know About It lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are collected from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 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 social media monitoring application for Pinterest users. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot helps you gain Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a bookmarklet, track what people are pinning from your website, who is pinning the most and what images from your website are trending on Pinterest with pin alerts, find which are your top performing boards and pins, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, search queries, and your selected keywords. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.
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 displayed to users in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Twitter.com, Attensity, Spinklr, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, interest, and 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 online merchants, bloggers, 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 that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution gives you all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments in the data and instantly route insights back to the enterprise.
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 in the Unified Social operating platform. These tools are part of a complete marketing suite allowing 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
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 a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
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 Facebook and Twitter 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 agencies and brands. Users can cut through the social noise, find 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 services and products 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 networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into communities 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 fast, simple, and affordable 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, your teams can share content with their social networks, prospects, and customers.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides multiple ways to search for users that might be interested in your brand. After finding your targeted group of users, you can then easily interact with users by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter notifies those users via mobile and email notifications, and if they are interested, they may check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides you with automated social networking 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, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search dozens 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 Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other service you use. You can quickly discover 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 access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results of what your friends are sharing above your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet displays your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.
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 using the WP CMS software to grow your business online, please see other tutorials and articles we have published on this site.
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