In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of monitoring tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to demographic criteria, psychographics, etc.
- Listen to online social conversations
- Identify consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can start meaningful conversations with your 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 for monitoring social media activity. If you’ve been searching for ways to increase sales with social media, then check out our list of dozens of social media management tools & resources for business owners.
Top Media Resources For WordPress Users
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, and your competitors on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, easy and simple way to know 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, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is a free, simple and useful tool for keeping up-to-date with news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and tracking what other people say online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only only a great tool for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for receiving information about people, companies, and any topic you want to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots (Googlebot) index a new web page, blog post, press release, news update, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: A Quick Guide On How To Set Up Google Alerts
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social media activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor 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 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 many social networks, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
To learn more, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will then automatically post the content for you at spaced out intervals over the day.
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 is also available as a web browser extension and as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
To learn more, visit this website: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetrics)
SocialMetrics is a WordPress plugin that monitors social signals across many leading social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, Digg, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn.
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.
Go here to learn more about Social Metrics: Social Metrics WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress accounts can be time-consuming. To get all these tasks done usually requires different tools, web applications, or plugins. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one single location with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, top viral video finder, bulk content importing & scheduling, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and much more.
More info: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a robust tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in social CRM, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that allows you to 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 displays your social channel data on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize your data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
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, 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.
More information: 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, 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.
More information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, online marketers, community managers, and content marketers. It lets you monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, buzz, social sentiment, etc. of posts from one platform.
Go here for more details: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring tool that lets you monitor how your business and brand is mentioned on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics across 30+ social channels. It gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across those social sites, and which areas can be improved.
For more information, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention provides media monitoring for all kinds of businesses, agencies, marketers, CEOs, etc..
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, 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.
Go here for more info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only a great analytics application, it can also monitor posts made from your WordPress website or blog to your social media sites.
Hootsuite has published a useful tutorial on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add like, share, and follow social media plugins and commenting features to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on the Facebook social platform.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
The Facebook Insights dashboard can help you track display data about your audience on Facebook. This helps you with your marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts have the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about audience demographics. You can then use this data to publish targeted content to Facebook users.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a monthly breakdown of your top tweets, followers, tweet impressions, profile views, and tweets linking to you.
The Twitter 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)
Go here for more details: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to video publishers.
You can see visitor demographics, views, traffic sources, video viewing time, estimated revenue from playbacks, etc.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps you see what Pins and boards people like most, what they save from your website, 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 who your audience is and what your customers want.
For more information, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media 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.
Here are some other social media applications. Keep in mind that new web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional lists and share these lists with colleagues, family and friends.
SDL/Alterian
SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you 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, view Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content. Marketers can optimize their 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 more easily discoverable?”, 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 schedule and publish 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 viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the kinds of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.
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 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 the url of your GooglePlus profile and it will start tracking your circles.
Commun.it
Commun.it is a community management tool for building relationships and discovering leads on Twitter.
Contax.io
Contax.io monitors your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail that can help you choose when to follow back.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and discussions on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your marketing, sales organizations, and customer service..
Disqus
Disqus integrates with WordPress and can be used instead of the built-in WordPress commenting system to expand the power of social discussions online. Millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with full featured, clean social apps for Facebook and Twitter. 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 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. If you work with audio, images, or videos, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online with social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which allows you to search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your products, company, or clients using a blogger outreach tool that lets you search, sort, 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 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 your 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 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 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 for Pinterest. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot helps you gain more Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a free 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 boards and pins, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, keywords, hashtags, and search queries are doing on Twitter. 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 application that allows you to track keywords, #hashtags, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Analytics are displayed in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, 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 online merchants, bloggers, and consumers 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 provides a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution gives you all the tools you 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 being acquired, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated with Unified Social’s operating platform. These tools form a complete marketing suite for 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
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 lets you analyze and understand audiences, competitors, and conversations that matter to you across every social channel.
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 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 tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of leading brands and agencies around the globe. Users can cut through the social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage 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 that allow you to create better products and services 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 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 your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides fast, affordable, and simple social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter 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, social networks, 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 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, automate photo likes and direct messaging, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search hundreds of relevant business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other social service you use. Discover which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based website that allows Twitter users to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly can help you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search 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 software to grow your business online, please see other tutorials 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)