In Part 1 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 that let you:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen in on online social conversations
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
This information lets you start 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 tools and applications you can use to monitor social media content. If you are searching for smarter ways to improve your business results using social media, then check out our list of the top social media analytics tools to help you measure social ROI.
Top Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress Users
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, and your competitors on social media)
Is there a simple and easy 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
(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 the latest news about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people, brands and companies, and track what other people are posting online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for sourcing the latest news about people, brands, companies, and any subject you want to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, blog post, press release, news update, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
If you want to learn how to set up Google alerts, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor 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 most used social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here for more info: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer account and it will be posted for you at spaced out intervals over the day.
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.
For more details, go here: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics)
SocialMetricsPro is a WordPress plugin that monitors 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, 1-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
If you want to learn more about Social Metrics Pro, refer to this article: Social Metrics Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any business marketing campaign. You can easily engage with your audiences, manage your social networks, schedule post messages, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, royalty-free image search tool, advanced link share customization for Facebook, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and much more.
For more details, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium tool aimed at small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in social Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, 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 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 displays your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by customers or business, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
For more information, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that 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, 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.
To learn more, 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 followers and following lists by a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, 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.
Visit this website to learn more: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social media monitoring tool for small and medium sized businesses, online marketers, analysts, content marketers, and community managers. Beevolve allows you to monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales, conversion, and engagement ROI, sentiment, buzz, etc. for your posts from one easy-to-use platform.
Go here to learn more: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you monitor how your brand or business is mentioned on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on those social sites.
More information: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention allows anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your brand 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 (sharing alerts and assigning mentions with different team members), and offers apps for mobile devices and desktop users.
For more details, 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 monitor posts made from your website to your social accounts.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to read a 6-step tutorial on how to track social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add social buttons to your WordPress site for linking, sharing, and commenting social media buttons and commenting features 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)
Facebook Page Insights can be seen by any page administrators and can help you with your marketing efforts by allowing you to better understand how people are engaging with your Page.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most comments, shares, and likes and to learn about user demographics. You can then use this information to publish content when your content is most likely to reach your target audience.
For more information, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a monthly break down of your profile views, tweets, tweet impressions, followers, and tweets linking back to you.
The Twitter 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)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets users see how their channel is performing on YouTube.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, real time, revenue, engagement, and watch-time reports.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics lets you see what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, what devices people are using, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin new content. With Pin insights, you can get information that helps you learn who your audience is and what your customers want.
Go here for more information: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Web 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 worth knowing about. Keep in mind that web technologies change. If any of the tools below change, 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 friends, colleagues and family.
SDL/Alterian
SDL Web (formerly Alterian) is an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users 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’ deep data science patent protected 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 content marketers’ questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content more easily discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
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 follow conversations, access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish 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 smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands looking to promote their products and services with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands positive media attention.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch is a social monitoring platform that lets marketers capture, analyze and share insights from social data to better evaluate the value of marketing in the socialsphere.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles following your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of your Google+ 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
Contaxio can be used to track your followers and friends on Twitter and other social networks.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will never miss another comment about your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and discussions on social media channels such as 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 is a social tool that helps improve conversations online. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. 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 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 moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, privately or publicly, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
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 products, clients, or company using 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 helps you analyze user’s social media 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 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 Know About It system from the past 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 lets you access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across the entire Pinterest network.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot helps you gain more 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 pins and boards, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for searches, keywords, and hashtags. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for your 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. Analytics are presented to users in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform (SocialEngage, Spredfast, Lithium, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, 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, 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 provides 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 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 for top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow lets you find a targeted audience, measure, manage and monetize 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 provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful 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 powerful 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 their online 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. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both historically and in real-time on any topic across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the audiences that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on your business, 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 of all social media and mainstream news, including Twitter, GooglePlus, Facebook and many more.
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, your 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 you with automated social networking Instagram 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 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. Discover which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows users on Twitter to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that gives you search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your best 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 Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
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We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now