In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of tracking tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen in on online social conversations
- Identify buying signals.
This information will allow you to engage in meaningful conversations with a targeted audience 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 content. If you’ve been searching for better ways to improve your business results using social media, then here are the best social media analytics tools for improving social media marketing ROI.
Great Media Tools For WordPress Users
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, and your competition on social media)
Is there a simple and easy (and free) way to find out what is new in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is a free, simple and useful tool for keeping up with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and tracking what other people are saying about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering the latest news about people, companies, and 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 bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, press release, blog post, news update, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social profiles from an intuitive dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, 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 leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here to learn more: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you at spaced out intervals over the day.
You can schedule updates for a day, week, or month. Scheduling times are preset, but you can change these in your settings. In addition to using a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
To learn more, visit this site: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics Pro)
Social Metrics is a plugin that tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
Some of the powerful features included in Social Metrics Pro 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 search improvement system.
To learn more about SocialMetricsPro, refer to this article: SocialMetricsPro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for entrepreneurial marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketing campaign. You can easily schedule post messages, engage with your audiences, manage your social media networks, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: image-sharing templates, the ability to spy on your competitors, advanced link share customization for Facebook, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and much more.
More info: 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, analytics and reports, 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 network accounts from one place.
Social Report tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, website performance and blogs, and returns data from your social channels on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize your data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
Go here for more information: 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, track, sort and compare followers, match your activities to gains and losses in followers to give your followers what they like best, find and connect with new influencers in your niche, where they are located, when do they tweet, hone your social graph by following and unfollowing users, etc.
More information: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with a set of powerful tools that help you 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, 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, understand who you follow, and more.
More info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social media monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, community managers, content marketers, and online marketers. It lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales and engagement, social buzz, sentiment, and more of posts.
Visit this website to learn more: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you monitor how brands or businesses are mentioned across various social platforms.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics on 35+ social sites. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across those social media sites.
Go here for more details: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention provides media monitoring for every type of business, agencies, CEOs, marketers, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media in real time.
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your business online, you have the ability to detect this, and access to intelligent, actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows for collaborative monitoring.
To learn more, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that applications like Google Analytics can also help you track posts made to your social media sites.
Hootsuite has published a simple 6-step tutorial that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you integrate like, share, and follow social media buttons and commenting features with your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your content is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
The Facebook Insights dashboard allows you to analyze page metrics like engagement, post reach, page likes, etc. to help you improve your marketing efforts.
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 when your ideal audience is on Facebook.
For more details, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a monthly breakdown of your tweets, followers, profile views, tweet impressions, and top tweets linking to you.
Twitter’s Analytics dashboard also provides you with useful information about your tweets in the form of Tweet highlights, allowing you to better plan your strategy for Twitter.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
More info: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics lets video publishers better understand how their channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can see demographics, views, traffic sources, estimated earnings from video playbacks, how long users watch videos, and more.
For more details, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. You can use the information to improve the way you pin.
More information: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media 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.
Here are some other social media services. Keep in mind that new web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal task lists and share these lists with friends, family 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 online consumers.
Answerbase
Create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. 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. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content more easily discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat (formerly ArgyleSocial – a social media marketing platform for marketers) is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat is 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 follow conversations, schedule and publish updates, access metrics and KPI, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your blog or favorite social network and interact with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the types of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
accurately tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your market, or your products.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring 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 Plus circles that include your profile. 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 influencers and customers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contax.io tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that can help you choose when to follow back.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and social media discussions on 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, then use that information to make informed 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. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of mentions and messages. Echofon for Twitter means you’ll never read a tweet twice by avoiding duplicate alerts on different devices, makes viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides 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 collaboration app for creatives. If you work with videos, images, or sounds, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online via social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is 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 content, topics, location, 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 audience hasn’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 collected from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application designed specifically for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across the entire Pinterest network.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot helps you grow Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a free 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 keywords, search queries, and hashtags. 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. Analytics are displayed to users using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with 16 Twitter platforms (Hootsuite, TweetDeck, MarketMeSuite, 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 links 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 is 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 moments or trends 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 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 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 provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media analytics that tell you how your social performance stacks against wider industry benchmarks and the competition. 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 insights about your audience, and track long-term brand performance.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social intelligence tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of agencies and leading brands around the globe. Users can cut through the social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure online 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 both historically and in real-time on any topic across all social channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the audiences that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment allows businesses to engage with everyone, everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, affordable, and fast 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 customers, prospects, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides multiple ways to search 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 then notifies those users via email and mobile notifications, and if they are interested, they may check your profile and follow back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated Instagram management software. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, follow/unfollow Instagram users, schedule posts, like back photos, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search for followers on Twitter in dozens of business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other service you use. Learn which of your tweets, posts, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based service that allows Twitter users to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results of what your friends are sharing above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly lets you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
***
We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about using the WP web site publishing software to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
***
"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)