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 look at a number of tracking tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Monitor social conversations online
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
This information will let you start a meaningful conversation with a targeted audience and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use to monitor social media activity. If you are searching for cost-effective ways to increase sales with social media, then here are 29 social monitoring tools and resources.
WordPress And Social Media – Useful Social Tracking Resources
(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, and your competition on social media)
Is there a free, simple and easy way to find out what is happening in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most useful online tools available for keeping up with news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and monitoring what is being said online about you and your business. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering news about people, brands, companies, or any topic you want 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 page, news update, blog post, press release, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to set up alerts with Google here: Setting Up A Google Alert – A Step-By-Step Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, quickly create and customize analytics reports, streamline workflows 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 a large number of social networks (including their app directory), and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here for more information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue 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 a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app.
Go here for more information: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetrics WordPress Social Plugin)
SocialMetricsPro is a plugin that lets you monitor Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
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, one-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
If you want to learn more about Social Metrics Pro, see this article: SocialMetricsPro Social Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, and Linkedin accounts can be time-consuming and to get all these tasks done usually requires different plugins, applications, or tools. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one location.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, Facebook fanpage finder, responsive mobile user interface, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and more.
For more details, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a premium tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in social Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
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, website performance and blogs, and displays data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
For more information, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you search Twitter bios to connect with influencers, compare followers of other users to find overlaps and new audiences, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
For more information, 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 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 who isn’t following you back, and more.
More information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social media monitoring tool for SMBs, online marketers, community managers, analysts, and content marketers. Beevolve lets you track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales and engagement, sentiment, buzz, etc. for those posts from a single platform.
Go here to learn more: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring tool that lets you monitor brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics across 36 social media sites and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
More information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention allows anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your business online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just an analytics software application that reports web traffic, web page views, visitor behavior, bounce rates, etc., it can also help you track social activities.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to view a useful six-step tutorial on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add share, like, and follow social plugins and commenting features to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your site is performing on Facebook’s social networking platform.
(Facebook Insights)
The Facebook Page Insights dashboard provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help you track data about your target audience on Facebook. You can then use this data to improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most comments, likes, and shares and to learn about your about your audience. You can then use this information to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.
To learn more, visit this website: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a breakdown of your profile views, top tweets, tweet impressions, followers, and top 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 better plan your strategy for marketing Twitter.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
Go here for more information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to video publishers.
You can see traffic sources, demographics, views, video viewing time, estimated revenue from video playbacks, etc.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
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. You can use the information to improve the way you pin.
For more details, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Services And Web Applications
Many new tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related worth knowing about. Keep in mind that web technologies change. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal to-do lists and share these lists with family, friends and colleagues.
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
Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, browse 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 online. Appinions’ technology allows 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 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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can track conversations, access metrics and KPI, publish and schedule updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and interact with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands searching for ways to promote their products and services with bloggers willing to write content designed to bring brands the positive media attention they are looking for.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch lets you tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your products or your market with pinpoint accuracy.
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
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles following your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add 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, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contaxio allows you to track your followers and friends on Twitter and other social networks.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you discover what consumers are saying about your brand, your products, and your competitors, and empower your team to plan, execute, and track compelling social media marketing..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that facilitates the growth and spread of online communities through blog 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 mentions and messages. 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 videos and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online using social collaboration.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which lets you search the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, or all of these 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, filter, and sort 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 location, content, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout brings influencers and brands together, rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, and ranks users social influence using a “Klout Score”. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your users haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares affect your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
KnowAboutIt is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. The stories are collected from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the Know About It 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, Facebook, and Twitter content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest management, analytics, and marketing tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across the entire Pinterest network.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot helps you gain Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a bookmarklet, create pin alerts, track your Pinterest performance, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for your keywords, search queries, and hashtags. TweetReach shows you the estimated potential of the tweets for any given query.
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. Users can monitor their performance results using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, and tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii lets you link online merchants, consumers, and bloggers by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. Approved users can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind is 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 trends or moments in the 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 form a complete marketing suite for top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow lets you discover, measure and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
RetweetRank lets you get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand.
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 stats that let you see how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. You can create, manage, and optimize all 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 agencies and leading brands around the globe. Users can cut through 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 aimed at creating better products and services for your customers. Simply type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying on any topic both historically and in real-time across all social channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into the audiences and communities that matter 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 various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, fast, and simple social media monitoring.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With one click of a button, teams can share content with their customers, prospects, and social networks.
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, follow/unfollow Instagram users, schedule posts, like back photos, automate photo likes and direct messaging, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search for followers on Twitter in many business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other social service you use. You can quickly discover which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and allows Twitter users to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results of what your friends are sharing online above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page that displays 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 top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a 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 WordPress to grow your business online, please see other tutorials and articles we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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