In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, their interests, etc.
- Monitor 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 better ways to increase sales using social media, then check out our list of the best social media management tools and resources for measuring social marketing ROI.
WordPress Resources For Media Tracking
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, and your competitors on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple and easy (and free) way to access information about what is happening in your niche or industry that would save you a massive amount of time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is one of the easiest and most useful tools available online for keeping up-to-date with the latest news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what is being written online about you and your business. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically sourcing the latest news about people, brands, companies, or any other topic you want to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing robots crawl a new web page, news update, press release, blog post, 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.
To learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts – A Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social media activities from an intuitive dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. You 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, and add employees and clients to teams without sharing passwords.
Hootsuite is one of the most used social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here for more details: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will post it 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 using a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps for iOS and Android devices and a web browser extension.
Visit this site to learn more: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics)
Social Metrics Pro is a plugin for WordPress that lets you track social activity from many leading social networks like Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Digg, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon.
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, 1-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article on SocialMetrics. Go here to learn more about this useful plugin: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to WordPress, Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook can be very time-consuming. To get all these tasks done you usually need to use different plugins, tools, and web applications. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one dashboard.
Sociocaster includes lots of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, social stream, bulk content importing & scheduling, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and much more.
To learn more, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium tool aimed at 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, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: 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, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
Go here for more details: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios to connect with anyone, compare Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
Go here to learn more: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of powerful tools that help you work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort followers and following lists by 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 influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out which inactive accounts you are following, and more.
For more information, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve is a social monitoring tool for SMBs, community managers, content marketers, online marketers, and analysts. Beevolve lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting conversion, engagement, and sales metrics, sentiment, buzz, and more of posts from one platform.
For more details, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to monitor how your business and brand is mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
Go here for more info: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for all types of businesses, CEOs, agencies, marketers, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media in real time.
Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your business online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
Go here for more info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just an analytics tool, it can also track posts made to your social campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a tutorial on tracking social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social media plugins to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights lets you analyze how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
The Facebook Insights dashboard can be viewed by any admins of your page and can help you improve your business marketing efforts by allowing you to track active users on your Page.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this data to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.
More info: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a breakdown of your tweets, profile visits, followers, tweet impressions, 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 better plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
Go here for more details: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets you see how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can monitor sources of traffic, viewer demographics, views, video viewing time, revenue from playbacks, and more.
Go here for more info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
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. You can get data about your audience so you can learn what your customers want.
Visit this site to learn more: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Tools And Services
New tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
Here are some other social media-related worth knowing about. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please contact us.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you 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 lets you create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse Q&A content, and get their questions answered.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing 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 questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, 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 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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can track conversations, access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your blog or favorite social network and engage with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands looking for ways to promote their products and services with bloggers who are willing to write content designed to bring brands the positive media attention they are looking for.
BrandWatch
Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that lets you collect, analyze and report on your social media data.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google Plus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add 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, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contax.io allows you to track your friends and followers on Twitter and other social networks.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
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 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 full featured, clean 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 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 or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with videos, images, or audio, 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.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach tool 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’s blog search 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
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 past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
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 Pinterest management, analytics, and marketing tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results across the entire Pinterest network.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot is a Pinterest-based social media marketing tool for small and medium-sized businesses. You can add multiple accounts and view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, search queries, and keywords. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media tracking tool that lets users track URLs, #hashtags, and keywords on Twitter and Instagram. Analytics are presented to users using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform 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 links 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 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 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 discover, measure and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive 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 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 media 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 online reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost the ROI of their social activities.
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. Simply type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying on any topic both in real-time and historically across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the audiences and communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment allows businesses to engage with everyone, everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, simple, and fast 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 one click of a button, teams can share content with their prospects, customers, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides multiple ways of searching for users that might be interested in your brand. Once you find your targeted group of users, you can then easily interact with users by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter notifies those users via email and mobile notifications, and if they are interested, they may check your profile and follow back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated social networking 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
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search many business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.
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 and any other service you use. Discover which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows Twitter users to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet shows your best 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 you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress to grow your business online, please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)