In Part One 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 examine a number of monitoring tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, psychographics, etc.
- Monitor and listen to online social conversations
- Identify consumer buying signals.
This information will let 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’ve been searching for ways to improve your business results with social media, then check out this list of dozens of social media analytics tools & resources that will help to improve social marketing.
Media Tools For Business Owners
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, or your competitors on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free and simple way to find out what is going on in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Well, 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 news about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and monitor what other people post online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only useful for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering news about people, brands, companies, and any subject you are interested in.
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 page, blog post, press release, news update, a tweet, video, or any other content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
If you want to learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts In 3 Quick And Easy Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, quickly 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 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, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
To learn more, visit this website: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will then automatically post the content for you at spaced intervals.
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 using a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a web browser extension.
More info: Buffer
Social Metrics
(Social Metrics)
SocialMetricsPro is a plugin for WordPress that lets you track social activity from leading social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
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.
We have written a detailed article on SocialMetricsPro. Go here to learn more about this useful plugin: Social Metrics Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketer or business. You can easily manage your social media networks, schedule post messages, engage with your audiences, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: built-in image-sharing designs, royalty-free image search tool, built-in comments, likes, retweets, and favorites checker, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and much 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 (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management and reporting solution 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 displays your social channel data on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize data by customers or business, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
To learn more, visit this site: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you search Twitter on any profile data: bio, location, name, who they follow, etc., compare followers of other users to find overlaps and new audiences, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends, and explore and grow your social graph..
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 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 the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, manage follows and unfollows, and more.
For more details, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social monitoring tool designed for SMBs, community managers, content marketers, online marketers, and analysts. Beevolve allows you to monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement, sales, and conversion metrics, social buzz, sentiment, and more of all posts from a single platform.
For more details, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social measuring tool that allows you to monitor how your business and brand is mentioned across various social media properties.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics and gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
To learn more, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for businesses, agencies, CEOs, marketers, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on websites, blogs, news, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook in real time.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows collaborative monitoring (assigning mentions to other team members and sharing alerts), and is cross-device compatible.
Go here to learn more: 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 also help you monitor posts made to your social media campaigns.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to view a tutorial on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add social media buttons to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
Facebook Page Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help track the number of active users. You can then use this data to improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have attracted the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about about your audience. You can then use this information to publish content when your content is most likely to reach more targeted people.
To learn more, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a monthly break down of your tweets, profile views, tweet impressions, followers, and 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 strategy for Twitter.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
Visit this site to learn more: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets video publishers better understand how their channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can measure viewer demographics, views, sources of traffic, video viewing duration, total estimated earning from playbacks, etc.
To learn more, 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 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 customers want.
To learn more, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Services & 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.
The list below contains a number of other social media tools. Keep in mind that new web technologies change. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional to-do lists and share these lists with friends, colleagues 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 allows users 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 is now part of ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content. Appinions’ technology allows customers to optimize every stage of the content marketing lifecycle. The ScribbleLive acquisition 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 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. Customers can follow conversations, publish and schedule updates, access metrics and KPI, 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 and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the types 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 part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a Google Plus education tool. 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 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 view Twitter analytics data.
Contax.io
Contaxio is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail that helps you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and discussions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening, and use that information to make informed business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog discussions. Millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of mentions and messages. 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 videos and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with videos, sounds, or images, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online via social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Icerocket is a social search engine which allows you to search Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software 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 location, topics, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that helps you analyze user’s social media influence using 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 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 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 provides users with a real-time content marketing platform that lets you engage your audience, leverage native and social user-generated content surrounding your brand, and curate Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application for Pinterest users. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a social media marketing platform that lets business using Pinterest schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts. Viralwoot lets you view the performance of your pins using the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, keywords, and searches. 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 over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, 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 links bloggers, consumers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. You 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 all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments in social data and instantly route insights back to the enterprise.
Unified Social / PageLevel
PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, was acquired by Unified Social 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 provides powerful tools designed to grow 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 provides easy social media analytics for your data in a single place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats 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 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 brands and agencies. Users can cut through social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure their online reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.
Sysomos
Sysomos monitors billions of conversations and helps 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 on any topic both historically and in real-time across all social channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides fast, simple, and affordable social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including GooglePlus, Twitter, 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
Tweepi provides a number of different ways to search for users that might have an interest in your brand. Once you find your targeted group of users, you can easily interact with them by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter notifies those users via mobile and email notifications, and if they are interested, they may check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated social networking Instagram management tools. 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
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search hundreds of relevant 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 lets you visualize your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other service you use. Know which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets users on Twitter view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time monitoring and analytics 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 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)