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 that let you:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, psychographics, etc.
- Monitor and listen to social conversations online
- Identify consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can start a meaningful conversation with a targeted audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you are looking for ways to increase sales with social media, then check out our list of the best social analytics tools for engaging with your audience.
Media Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online
(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, and your competitors 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. 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 tools available online for keeping up with news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what other people are publishing about you and your business online. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically receiving information about people, companies, or any subject you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, news update, blog post, press release, a tweet, video, or any other content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to set up alerts with Google here: How To Set Up Google Alerts In Three Simple Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social profiles from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. 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 from the dashboard, and collaborate with teams.
Hootsuite is one of the most used social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many social networks (including their app directory), and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
For more information, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
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 the web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a web browser extension.
For more details, go here: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(SocialMetricsPro)
Social Metrics is a WordPress plugin that tracks social signals from many leading social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Digg, and StumbleUpon.
Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetrics 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.
We have written a comprehensive article about SocialMetricsPro here: SocialMetrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any business marketing campaign. You can easily manage your social networks, engage with your audiences, schedule messages, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes powerful marketing and social features: built-in image-sharing design templates, royalty-free image finder, built-in bookmarklet, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and more.
To learn more, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium social media management 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, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that lets you track and manage all of your social network 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 on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by customers or business, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
To learn more, visit this website: 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 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 you with 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, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, easily search inside your Twitter stream to find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, manage follows and unfollows, and more.
Go here for more details: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform designed for SMBs, analysts, community managers, content marketers, and online marketers. It lets you monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales and engagement, social sentiment, buzz, and more for those posts.
Go here to learn more: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring service that lets you see how your brand is mentioned across different social properties.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on those social media sites.
More information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention can help any type of business monitor the web.
Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention can also be used for collaborative monitoring (assigning mentions with different team members and sharing alerts), and is cross-device compatible.
To learn more, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only an analytics tool, it can also help you track social activities.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to read a great six-step guide on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you integrate share, like, and follow social media plugins and commenting features with your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your campaigns are performing on Facebook’s social networking platform.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Page Insights can help you analyze metrics like page likes, engagement, post reach, etc. This helps you with your business marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts have attracted the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about your the demographics of your audience. You can then use this data to publish more of the types of posts that your audience is hungry for.
Go here to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are 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 better plan your strategy for marketing Twitter.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
For more information, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to publishers.
You can measure sources of traffic, demographics, views, how many minutes users watch videos, revenue from playbacks, etc.
For more details, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what Pins and boards people like most, 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 use the information to improve the way you pin.
Go here for more information: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Web Applications
Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses make sense of social media.
Here are some other social media tools and services. Keep in mind that web technologies change. If any of the tools below change, please contact us.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional to-do lists and share these lists with family, friends and colleagues.
SDL/Alterian
SDL Web (formerly Alterian) is an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you create engaging digital experiences with your customers.
Answerbase
Create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, browse Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
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 for planning, creating and distributing content. 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. Appinions enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to content marketers’ questions like “what should we write about?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is a powerful data analytics platform 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. Customers can schedule and publish updates, access metrics and KPI, monitor conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and engage with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the kinds of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that allows you to collect, analyze and report on your social media data.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use GooglePlus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles following your profile. If your profile isn’t already being monitored 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 influencers and customers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contaxio monitors your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail that helps you decide 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 discussions on social media 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 customer service, sales organizations, and marketing..
Disqus
Disqus is a social tool that aims to help improve conversations online. Millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with full featured, clean 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 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 photos or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online with social collaboration.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social search engine which lets you search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach tool that lets you sort, search, 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, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, brings influencers and brands together, and ranks users 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 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 gathered from the Know About It 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 collect and manage content from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest 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 how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. using built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, hashtags, keywords, and search queries are doing on Twitter. TweetReach shows you the estimated potential of the tweets for your given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search tracking application that lets you track hashtags, URLs, and keywords on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic metrics are presented using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, 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 lets you link consumers, online merchants, 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 provides users with all the tools they 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 in the Unified Social 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 an audience, measure, manage, optimize and monetize your social media presence.
RetweetRank
RetweetRank lets you get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides easy social media analytics for your data in one place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful 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 Facebook and Twitter 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 media 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 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 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 networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the communities 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 simple, fast, and affordable social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many more.
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, prospects, and customers.
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 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, 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. You can search for followers on Twitter in dozens of 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, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other social service you use. You can quickly find out which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and allows users on Twitter to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results of what your friends are sharing online on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social 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 the WordPress CMS platform to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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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)