In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of tracking tools that let you:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen in on online social conversations
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can engage in meaningful conversations with your 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 are searching for ways to improve your business results using social media, then here are 25+ social management tools & resources.
Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a simple and easy way to access information about what is going on in your niche or industry that can save you a massive 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 online tools available for keeping up with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and tracking what is being written about you and your business online. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for gathering information about people, brands, companies, or any other topic you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, news update, press release, blog post, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
To learn how to set up Google alerts, see this tutorial: How To Set Up A Google Alert - 3 Quick & Easy Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social media activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track 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 a large number of social networks (including their app directory), and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here for more information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you at spaced intervals.
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 a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app.
Visit this website to learn more: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetricsPro WordPress Social Analytics Plugin)
Social Metrics Pro is a WordPress plugin that lets you monitor social signals from many leading social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and Digg.
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 autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
If you want to learn more about SocialMetricsPro, see this article: SocialMetrics Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketer or business. You can easily schedule messages, engage with audiences, manage your social media networks, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, the ability to spy on your competitors, built-in bookmarklet, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and much more.
Go here for more details: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium social media management 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, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: 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, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by customers or business, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
More information: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
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, discover who your most important, influential followers are, 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 easy to use tools that empowers work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort followers and following lists using a range of criteria, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, easily search inside your Twitter stream to 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.
More information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve is a social monitoring tool for small and medium sized businesses, content marketers, online marketers, analysts, and community managers. Beevolve lets you track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales, conversion, and engagement metrics, sentiment, buzz, etc. of all your posts.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social measuring service that lets you monitor how your business or brand is mentioned on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics across dozens of social media sites and gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
More information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for all types of businesses, CEOs, marketers, agencies, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on news, websites, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter in real time.
Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
For more details, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only a web analytics software application that reports visitor behavior, web page views, web traffic, where your visitors are coming from or leaving your site from, etc., it can also monitor posts made to your social media accounts.
Hootsuite has published a six-step guide that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you integrate like, share, and follow social plugins and commenting features with your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on the Facebook social platform.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Page Insights tracks displays data about your audience on Facebook to help you with your 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 user demographics. You can then use this data to create more of the types of posts that your audience is interested in reading.
To learn more, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a monthly break down of your top tweets, profile views, tweet impressions, 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.com – Tweet activity)
Go here for more info: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to video publishers.
You can monitor user demographics, sources of traffic, views, earnings from video playbacks, average video viewing time, and more.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore 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. You can get data about your audience so you can learn what your customers want.
Go here for more info: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related 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 tools and services. Keep in mind that new web technologies change. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional task lists and share your lists with colleagues, family and friends.
SDL/Alterian
SDL Web (formerly Alterian) is 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 your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users 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. 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. This tool provides answers to content marketers’ questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat 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 publish and schedule updates, monitor 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 engage with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands looking to promote their services and products with bloggers willing to write content designed to bring brands positive media attention.
BrandWatch
accurately tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your market, or your products.
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 is a GooglePlus education resource. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles in which you are included. If your profile isn’t already being monitored 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, manage multiple profiles and schedule posts, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contaxio is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail to help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and discussions on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets 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 free service that facilitates the growth and spread of online communities through blog comments and discussions. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Facebook and Twitter. Echofon apps notify you of mentions and messages. Echofon for Twitter automatically keeps unread tweets in sync between apps 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 videos and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with images, sounds, or videos, 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.
Meltwater Icerocket
Icerocket is a social search engine which allows you to search Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software that lets you filter, sort, and search 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 topics, content, 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
KnowAboutIt is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. 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 KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest users. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results across Pinterest.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot is a social media marketing tool 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 pins with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for chosen keywords, hashtags, and search queries. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports with the estimated reach of your tweets based on various methods of measuring performance.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring tool that lets users track keywords, hashtags, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic metrics are displayed 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 real-time 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 consumers, bloggers, 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 is 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 trends or moments 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 allowing 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
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
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 audiences, conversations, and competitors that matter to you across every social channel.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media analytics 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 your brand’s performance over the long term.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social media 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, find the conversations that matter, measure 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 aimed at creating better services and products for your customers. Simply type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both historically and in real-time on any topic across all social networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the audiences that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to 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 lets you easily support your sales enablement, social selling, and employee advocacy efforts by providing relevant content to your employees. With the 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 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, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search for followers on Twitter in hundreds 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 Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other social service you use. Know which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets Twitter users access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly can help you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
***
We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP web site publishing platform to grow your business online, please see other tutorials we have published on this site.
***
"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum