In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of tracking tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to demographic criteria, psychographics, etc.
- Listen to online social conversations
- Identify consumer buying signals.
This information will let you start meaningful conversations with your audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use to monitor social media activity. If you’ve been searching for ways to increase sales using social media, then here are 25+ social management tools and resources for businesses and WordPress users.
WordPress Resources - Media Tracking
(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, and your competition on social media)
Is there a simple and easy way to access information about what is new 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
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people, brands and companies, and monitor what other people are posting online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering information about people, brands, companies, and any other topic you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing robots (Googlebot) crawl a new web page, news update, press release, blog post, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
If you would like to learn how to set up Google alerts, see this step-by-step tutorial: Setting Up A Google Alert – A Step-By-Step Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social profiles from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, create and customize analytics reports, share the workload amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations from the dashboard, and collaborate with teams.
Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many social networks, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
More information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You 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 a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps for iOS and Android devices and a browser extension.
Go here for more info: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(Social Metrics Pro)
SocialMetrics is a plugin for WordPress that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
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 auto-update functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
If you want to learn more about SocialMetricsPro, see this article: Social Metrics Pro Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Posting to your Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, and Linkedin accounts can be very time-consuming. To get all of these tasks done usually requires different software, web applications, and plugins. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one location with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes powerful social and marketing features: pre-made image-sharing designs, Facebook fanpage finder, responsive mobile user interface, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and more.
More information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a robust social media management tool aimed at small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here for more info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management tool 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, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and displays data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, 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..
To learn more, go here: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with a set of easy to use tools that empowers work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort your followers and following lists using 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, clean up and manage who you follow, and more.
More info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring platform designed for SMBs, community managers, analysts, content marketers, and online marketers. Beevolve allows you to monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement and sales, social buzz, sentiment, etc. of all your posts.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring tool that lets you see how business or brands are mentioned across various social media platforms.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics across 36 social channels. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on those social sites.
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 take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows you to collaborate with different team members.
Go here for more details: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that software applications like Google Analytics can help monitor posts made from your website to your social campaigns.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to view a six-step tutorial on how to track social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social buttons to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This lets you analyze how your site is performing on the Facebook social networking platform.
(Facebook Insights)
The Facebook Page Insights dashboard lets you see displays data about your target audience on Facebook to help you improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have attracted the most shares, comments, and likes and to learn about your audience demographics. You can then use this information to publish content when your posts are most likely to reach more targeted people.
For more details, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a monthly breakdown of your profile views, tweet impressions, tweets, followers, 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 plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
Visit this website to learn more: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets you better understand how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can measure views, traffic sources, audience demographics, how many minutes users watch videos, total estimated earning from playbacks, and more.
For more information, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics helps you see what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. You can get data about your audiences and learn what they want more of.
Visit this website to learn more: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Tools
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 applications. Keep in mind that new web technologies continually evolve. If anything changes in the list below, please contact us.
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 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
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 was acquired by ScribbleLive, 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. This tool provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can schedule and publish updates, follow conversations, access metrics and KPI, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your blog or favorite social network and interact with viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the kinds of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch allows you to listen to conversations about your brand, your products or your market with pinpoint accuracy.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a Google Plus education tool. 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 is a community management tool for building relationships and discovering leads on Twitter.
Contax.io
Contaxio is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail to help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment about your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps 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 facilitates the growth and spread of online communities through blog comments and discussions. 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 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 and videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save any moment 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 search engine which allows you to search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, products, or clients 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’s blog search 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 change 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 past 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 capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest analytics, management, and marketing tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across Pinterest.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a social media marketing platform that lets small and medium-sized business schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts on Pinterest. Multiple accounts can be added to the tool and you can view the performance of your boards and pins with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, search queries, hashtags, and keywords are performing on Twitter. TweetReach shows you the estimated potential of the tweets for any given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media tracking application that allows you to track hashtags, URLs, and keywords on Twitter and Instagram. Users can view their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with 16 Twitter platforms (Twitter.com, Spredfast, Salesforce Desk, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, and activity 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. You can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind provides a complete social data platform for conducting social business One web-based solution gives you all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends 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 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 discover, measure, manage and maximize your social media presence.
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 lets you analyze and understand conversations, competitors, and audiences that matter to you across every social channel.
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 of your Facebook and Twitter 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 intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of leading brands and agencies around the world. Users can cut through the 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 that allow you to create better services and products 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 networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into the communities that matter 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 different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, fast, 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 the click of a button, teams can share content with their social networks, customers, and prospects.
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 lists.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated Instagram management tools. 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, search by hashtag, create lists, 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 relevant 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 Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other social service you use. You can quickly find out which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets Twitter users access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam gives you search results of what your friends are sharing above your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
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 shows your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.
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 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)