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 examine a number of tracking tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests, etc.
- Monitor and listen to social conversations online
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
This information lets you start a meaningful conversation with your audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you are looking for smarter ways to increase sales with social media, then here are the best social media analytics tools & resources.
WordPress Social Media Tracking – Tools
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, and your competitors on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, easy and simple 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? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up with news and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people, brands and companies, and monitor what is being said about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for sourcing news about people, companies, and any other subject you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots (Googlebot) index a new web site, press release, blog post, news update, a tweet, video, or any other content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
To learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this tutorial: Setting Up A Google Alert – A Simple & Easy Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social media activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. Users 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 leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks (including their app directory), and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
For more details, visit this website: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue 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 the web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.
More information: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetricsPro)
Social Metrics is a WordPress plugin that tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WordPress Admin 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, 1-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article about SocialMetricsPro. You can learn more go here: SocialMetricsPro Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any marketing campaign. You can easily manage your social networks, engage your audiences, schedule messages, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, viral video finder, advanced link share customization for Facebook, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and more.
To learn more, visit this site: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a premium tool aimed at small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
To learn more, go here: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that allows you to 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 returns data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
For more information, go here: 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, sort and compare followers, match your activities to gains and losses in followers to give your followers what they like best, discover who your most important, influential followers are, where they are located, when do they tweet, hone your social graph by following and unfollowing users, etc.
Go here for more details: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of easy to use tools to empower you to work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort your followers and following lists by a range of criteria, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, search twitter bios to easily find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, understand who you follow, and more.
Go here for more details: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, online marketers, content marketers, community managers, and analysts. Beevolve lets you monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement and sales, sentiment, social buzz, etc. of posts.
Go here for more information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring service that lets you see how your business or brand is mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics across more than 35 social media channels and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across social media sites, and what areas can be improved.
Visit this site to learn more: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention helps businesses monitor the web.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, 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.
Go here for more information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that tools like Google Analytics can also help you track links posted from your website to your social sites.
Hootsuite has published a six-step guide that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics here.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add social media plugins to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
The Facebook Insights dashboard provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help better understand page performance. 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 create more of the types of posts that your audience is hungry for.
For more details, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a monthly break down of your followers, tweet impressions, tweets, profile visits, 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 better plan your Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to video publishers.
You can measure demographics, views, sources of traffic, how long users watch videos, estimated earnings from playbacks, and more.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
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 content to your boards. With Pin insights, you can get information that helps you learn what your audiences want.
Go here for more details: 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 tools. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. If any of the tools below change, please contact us.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal lists and share these lists with colleagues, friends and family.
SDL/Alterian
SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that allows you to create engaging digital experiences with your customers.
Answerbase
Create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, view Q&A content, and get their questions answered.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content. Appinions’ technology allows customers to optimize all stages of the content marketing lifecycle. Appinions 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 discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat (formerly ArgyleSocial – a social media marketing platform for marketers) is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat runs a powerful data analytics tool 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. Users can monitor conversations, access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your favorite social network or blog and engage with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the types of opportunities they are open to being 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 in the socialsphere.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCount is a Google Plus education resource. 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+ profile and it will start tracking your circles.
Commun.it
Commun.it is a community management tool for building relationships and discovering leads on Twitter.
Contax.io
Contax.io is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail to help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and social media discussions on channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps 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 connects people online through blog comments and discussions. Millions of websites covering pretty much any 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 viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides real-time chat that lets you quickly send and receive messages to any of your online friends, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post photos or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with videos, audio, or images, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online using social collaboration.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which lets you 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 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 makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on content, location, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and 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 your social influence using a “Klout Score”. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your friends, fans, and followers haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares 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 gathered from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you collect and manage content from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot is a social media marketing tool for small and medium sized businesses using Pinterest. Viralwoot lets you view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for keywords, hashtags, and searches. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports with the estimated reach of your tweets based on various methods of measuring performance.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring application that lets you track keywords, #hashtags, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Analytics are displayed in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, and real-time social monitoring tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links online merchants, consumers, and bloggers by tagging images on the web. 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 you with 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 with Unified Social’s 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 find an audience, measure and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
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 audiences, competitors, and conversations that matter to you across all social channels.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media analytics that let you see 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 global agencies and brands. Users can cut through social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure their 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 both in real-time and historically on any topic 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 to find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, simple, and fast 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 customers, prospects, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides multiple ways of searching for users that could have an interest in your brand. After finding your targeted group of users, you can easily interact with them by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter 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, schedule posts, follow/unfollow Instagram users, like back photos, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search for Twitter followers in many relevant business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other social service you use. Know which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets users on Twitter view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that gives you 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 that displays the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
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We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress to grow your business online, please see other articles and tutorials we have published on this site.
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"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)