In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of tracking tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, their interests, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on social conversations online
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
This information lets you start a meaningful conversation 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 to monitor social media activity. If you’ve been searching for better ways to improve your business results with social media, then check out our list of 25+ social monitoring tools for helping you gain a better understanding of your customers.
WordPress Resources For Media Monitoring
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, and your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free and simple way to access information about what is happening in your industry or niche that would save you a massive 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 one of the simplest and most useful tools available online 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 posting about you and your business online. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering news about people, companies, or any subject you want to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing bots crawl a new web page, news update, blog post, press release, a video, tweet, or any other 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 Google Alerts
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social media activities from an easy to use dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, 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 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.
Go here for more info: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will then post it 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 also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.
To learn more, visit this site: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics)
SocialMetricsPro is a plugin for WordPress that lets you monitor 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.
Go here to learn more about Social Metrics: Social Metrics Pro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for online marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any marketing campaign. You can easily engage your audiences, schedule post messages, manage your social networks, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, royalty-free image search tool, responsive mobile user interface, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and much more.
Go here for more info: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a robust social media management tool built for 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, security features, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that allows you to 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 data from your social channels on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that 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.
Go here for more information: 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, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, search twitter bios to easily find and follow the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out who isn’t following you back, and more.
Visit this website to learn more: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring platform for SMBs, content marketers, online marketers, analysts, and community managers. Beevolve lets you monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales and engagement, sentiment, buzz, and more of all your posts.
To learn more, visit this website: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social measuring service that lets you monitor brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics and delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and which channels can be improved.
More information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention provides media monitoring for every kind of business, CEOs, marketers, agencies, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on news sites, websites, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Mention uses algorithms that take billions of data points into account, 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.
Visit this website to learn more: 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 monitor links from your website to your social media accounts.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to read a useful six-step tutorial on tracking social media links with Google Analytics.
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. This application lets you analyze how your content is performing on the Facebook social networking platform.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
The Facebook Insights dashboard lets you see displays data about your target audience on Facebook to help you improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish more of the type of content that your audience is hungry for.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a break down of your top tweets, tweet impressions, profile views, followers, 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 plan your Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
For more information, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to video publishers.
You can measure user demographics, traffic sources, views, average video viewing time, estimated earnings from video playbacks, and more.
Go here for more info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics lets you see what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. You can use the information to improve the way you pin.
Go here to learn more: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Web Applications
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.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related services. Keep in mind that new web technologies continually evolve. If anything changes in the list below, please contact us.
Wunderlist
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 Web (formerly Alterian) is an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you create engaging digital experiences with your customers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create your own social Q&A community. 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 online. Appinions’ technology enables customers to optimize all stages of the content marketing lifecycle. The ScribbleLive acquisition 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 is 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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can schedule and publish updates, access metrics and KPI, monitor conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your blog or favorite social network and interact with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands searching for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers who are willing to write content aimed at bringing brands positive media attention.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch lets you tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your products or your market with pinpoint accuracy.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add your GooglePlus 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 friends and followers 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 the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, 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 social tool that aims to help improve conversations 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 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 real-time chat that lets you quickly send and receive messages to any of your friends online, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post videos or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which lets you search Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach tool that lets you search, filter, and sort 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 location, content, topics, 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 friends, fans, and followers haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares affect your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
KnowAboutIt is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. The stories are collected from the Know About It system from the past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest analytics, management, and marketing tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results across the entire Pinterest network.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot helps you gain Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, 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 allows you to measure how well your tweets, hashtags, search queries, and keywords are performing on Twitter. 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 presented using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links bloggers, consumers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. 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 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 find an audience, 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 easy social media analytics for all of your data in a single place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats 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 powerful insights about your audience, and track long-term brand performance.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social intelligence and social listening 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 online reputation, manage 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 products and services for your customers. 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 get insights into communities that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment allows businesses to engage with everyone, everywhere. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, simple, and fast social media monitoring.
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 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 automated social networking 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, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search many business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other service you use. You can quickly learn which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based service that allows Twitter users to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results based on what your friends share 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 share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.
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We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP content publishing software to grow your business online, please see other tutorials we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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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)