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 tracking tools that let you:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on social conversations online
- Identify consumer buying signals.
This information will let you start a meaningful conversation with your audience and pitch them your message.
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 increase sales with social media, then here are more than 27 social media management tools and resources.
WordPress And Social Media – Useful Social Monitoring Tools
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a free, simple and easy way to find out what is new in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is, and 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 monitor what other people post about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for gathering the latest news about people, companies, or any other subject you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you just 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 indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
If you need to learn how to set up Google alerts, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: A Quick Guide On Setting Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social profiles from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service. 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 leading 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.
For more details, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted 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 also provides mobile apps for iOS and Android devices and a browser extension.
Go here to learn more: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(Social Metrics WordPress Social Analytics Plugin)
SocialMetrics is a WordPress plugin that lets you track Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetrics 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 SEO improvement system.
Go here for a detailed article about SocialMetrics: SocialMetrics Social Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress accounts can be time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done usually requires using different software, web apps, or plugins. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one location.
Sociocaster includes lots of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, top viral video finder and posting tool, bulk content importing & scheduling, unlimited social account management (agency license), and much more.
To learn more, visit this site: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
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 CRM, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Visit this website for more information: 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, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
More information: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze their tweeting habits, track, sort and compare 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.
Go here to learn more: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of easy to use tools to empower you to work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort followers and following lists by a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, 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.
Go here for more information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring tool for SMBs, community managers, analysts, online marketers, and content marketers. It allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting conversion, engagement, and sales ROI, sentiment, buzz, and more for your posts.
For more information, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring service that allows you to see how your brand is mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics across more than 35 social media sites and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across social sites, and which channels you can improve your marketing on.
More information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention provides social media monitoring for all types of businesses, CEOs, agencies, marketers, etc..
Mention uses algorithms that take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows you to collaborate with other team members.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that free and powerful applications like Google Analytics can also help you track posts made to your social media campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a great 6-step tutorial 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 add follow, share, and like social buttons and commenting features to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This application lets you understand how your content is performing on Facebook’s platform.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Page Insights can be seen by all the admins of your page and can help you improve your marketing efforts by allowing you to analyze page metrics like page likes, engagement, post reach, etc.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most comments, shares, and likes and to learn about your user demographics. You can then use this information to publish relevant posts when your ideal audience is on Facebook.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a monthly break down of your tweet impressions, top tweets, profile visits, followers, and tweets linking back 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 marketing Twitter.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
For more information, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets publishers see how their channel is performing on YouTube.
You can measure views, traffic sources, demographics, video viewing time, revenue from playbacks, etc.
For more details, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics lets 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. You can use the information to improve the way you pin.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Services And Aplications
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 tools. Keep in mind that web technologies are continually evolving. If any of the tools below change, 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 task lists and share your lists with friends, colleagues and family.
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 online consumers.
Answerbase
Create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, browse Q&A content, and get their questions answered.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute 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 questions like “what should we write about?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers 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 favorite social network or blog and interact with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the types of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch allows you to tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your products or your market with pinpoint accuracy.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a GooglePlus education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles that include your profile. 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 is a community management tool for building relationships and discovering leads on Twitter.
Contax.io
Contaxio monitors your friends and followers 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 the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening on social media, then use that information to make better business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a social tool that helps improve conversations online. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with 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 simple, streamlined navigation and an uncluttered Facebook experience, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post photos and videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with sounds, images, or videos, 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 with social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach tool that lets you sort, search, 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 location, topics, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a social media monitoring and performance analysis tool. Klout brings influencers and brands together, rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, and ranks users social influence using a “Klout Score”. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your audience hasn’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares affect your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
Know About It is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. The stories are gathered from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 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 Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest analytics, management, and marketing tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results across Pinterest.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot helps you gain more Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a 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, track your Pinterest performance, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, keywords, search queries, and hashtags are performing on Twitter. TweetReach gives you the estimated potential of the tweets for any given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media tracking service that lets users track keywords, hashtags, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their performance metrics 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 lets you link consumers, online merchants, and bloggers by tagging images on the web. You can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind provides a complete social data platform for conducting social business One web-based solution provides 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
PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, was acquired by Unified Social in January 2013. Since then, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated in the Unified Social 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 provides powerful tools designed to help you grow and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand audiences, conversations, and competitors that matter to you across all social channels.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats 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 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 global agencies and brands. Users can cut through social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure their digital 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 products and services 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. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the communities that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment allows businesses to engage with everyone, everywhere. Depending on what business you run, 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 a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, your teams can share content with their prospects, customers, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides a number of different ways to search for users that could be interested in your brand. After finding your targeted group of users, you can then easily interact with users by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter then 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 automated 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
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search dozens of 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 service you use. You can quickly discover which of your tweets, posts, photos, or videos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter 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 chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly can help you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet shows your top 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 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 the benefits of using WordPress to grow your business online, please see other posts 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)