In Part One 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, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to demographic criteria, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Listen to social conversations online
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can start a meaningful conversation with a targeted audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you are searching for cost-effective ways to increase sales using social media, then here are the best social media management tools & resources for better understanding your ideal audience.
Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress Users
(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, and your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free, simple and easy 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
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with news about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and track what is being published online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for gathering news about people, 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 bots crawl a new web page, blog post, press release, news update, a tweet, video, or any other content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: How To Set Up Google Alerts In 3 Simple Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social profiles from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, 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 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 (including their app directory), and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here to learn more: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will post it for you.
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.
More information: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(Social Metrics Pro WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin)
Social Metrics is a plugin for WordPress that tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WordPress Dashboard.
Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetricsPro 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 for a detailed article about SocialMetrics: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for online marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketing campaign. You can easily manage your social networks, schedule messages, engage your audiences, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, viral video finder and posting tool, built-in favorites, likes, retweets, and comments checker, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and much more.
Go here to learn more: 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, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, 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.
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 your data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
For more details, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, compare followers of other users to find overlaps and new audiences, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
More information: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with a set of easy to use tools that empowers work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort your followers and following lists by a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, 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.
More info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool for small and medium sized businesses, content marketers, community managers, online marketers, and analysts. Beevolve allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure conversion, sales, and engagement ROI, sentiment, social buzz, and more for your posts.
To learn more, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you see how your brand and business is mentioned across various social media platforms.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing across social media sites.
More information: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention helps any type of business monitor the web.
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
Go here to learn more: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just an analytics application, it can also track posts made to your social sites.
Hootsuite has published a six-step guide on how to track social media links with Google Analytics here.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add like, share, and follow social media buttons and commenting features to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights lets you see how your site is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
The Facebook Insights dashboard provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help better understand metrics about how audiences are engaging with your Page. You can then use this information to improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about your the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to create more of the type of content that your audience finds relevant.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a break down of your followers, profile visits, top tweets, tweet impressions, and tweets linking back 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 Analytics – Tweet activity)
Go here for more details: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets publishers see how their channel is performing on YouTube.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, real time, revenue, watch-time, and engagement reports.
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, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. With Pin insights, you can get data about your audiences and learn what your customers want.
More information: 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 web technologies continually evolve. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional to-do lists and share your lists with colleagues, friends and family.
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, 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. 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 “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 runs 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. Customers can monitor conversations, publish and schedule updates, 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 interact with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content 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 that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.
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 tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of your Google+ 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
Contaxio is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that can help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment about your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and discussions on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your customer service, sales organizations, and marketing..
Disqus
Disqus is a social tool that helps improve conversations online. Millions of websites covering pretty much any 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 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 photos or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online with social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which lets you search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, 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 makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on content, location, topics, 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 affect 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 Know About It 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, Twitter, and Instagram content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest analytics, management, and marketing tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results across the Pinterest network.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot is a social media marketing tool that lets business using Pinterest schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts. Viralwoot lets you view the performance of your pins with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for specific keywords, searches, and hashtags. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for any 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. Users can monitor their performance metrics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff 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 links bloggers, online merchants, 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 is a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution provides you with all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments 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 being acquired, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated with Unified Social’s operating platform. These tools form a complete marketing suite allowing top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow makes it easy to discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.
RetweetRank
Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.
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 conversations, competitors, and the audiences 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 the competition and wider industry benchmarks. You can create, manage, and optimize all of your Facebook and Twitter 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 brands and agencies. Users can cut through social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure 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 that allow you to create better services and products for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both in real-time and historically 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 affordable, fast, and simple social media monitoring and social analytics insights including trends, keyword discovery, automated sentiment analysis & influence scoring.
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 multiple ways of searching 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 email and mobile notifications, and if they are interested, they can check your profile and follow back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated social networking Instagram management tools. 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
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search dozens of 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 lets you visualize your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other service you use. You can quickly find out which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets users on Twitter 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 above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly can help you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet shows 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 powerful 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 WordPress to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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