In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides 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, sort, filter and organize users according to demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Monitor social conversations online
- Identify consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can start a meaningful conversation with your audience and pitch them information about your products or services.
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 improve your business results with social media, then here are more than 25 free or cost-effective social media monitoring tools and resources
for WordPress users.
WordPress And Social Media Tracking
(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 and simple way to know what is happening in your industry or niche that would save you time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with news and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and monitor what other people are publishing about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only useful for managing your reputation online, but also for receiving the latest news about people, companies, and any subject you want to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots (Googlebot) index a new web page, blog post, news update, press release, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
If you would like to learn how to set up Google alerts, see this simple tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts In Three Quick And Easy Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social media activities 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, share the workload amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations, 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, 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 it will be posted for you at spaced out intervals over the day.
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 using a web interface, Buffer is also available as a web browser extension and as a mobile app.
More info: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(SocialMetricsPro)
SocialMetricsPro is a plugin for WordPress that lets you track social activity from leading social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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.
Go here if you would like to learn more about SocialMetrics: SocialMetricsPro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for online marketers)
Posting to your Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress, and Twitter accounts can be very time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done you usually need to use different plugins, applications, and tools. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one single location with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster includes lots of powerful social and marketing features: built-in image-sharing designs, top viral video search tool, advanced link share customization for Facebook, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and much more.
Visit this site to learn more: 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 social Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that lets you track and manage all of your social media accounts from one place.
It tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, website performance and blogs, and displays data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
Go here to learn more: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that 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, 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.
Go here for more info: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
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 is a social media monitoring tool for SMBs, content marketers, online marketers, community managers, and analysts. Beevolve lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales, conversion, and engagement metrics, social sentiment, buzz, etc. for your posts from one platform.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you see how your brand or business is mentioned across various social media platforms.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics across 36 social media sites. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on those social sites, and what aspects of your marketing strategy can be improved.
To learn more, visit this site: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention provides media monitoring for businesses, marketers, CEOs, agencies, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on news, blogs, websites, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, 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.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just a web analytics application that tracks and reports website traffic, unique web page views and view duration, visitor behavior, identify your website’s best performing pages, etc., it can also help you track posts made from your WordPress website to your social media accounts.
Hootsuite has published a simple tutorial that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics here.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you integrate share, like, and follow social media buttons and commenting features with your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your site is performing on the Facebook platform.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Insights lets you analyze metrics like page likes, engagement, post reach, etc. to help you improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most shares, comments, and likes and to learn about your audience demographics. You can then use this information to create more of the type of content that your audience finds relevant.
For more details, visit this website: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a monthly break down of your followers, tweets, profile visits, tweet impressions, 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)
More info: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets you see how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can track traffic sources, visitor demographics, views, estimated revenue from video playbacks, how long users watched a video, and more.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. You can get information that helps you learn who your audience is and what they want.
For more details, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Applications
Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media services. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional to-do lists and share these lists with family, friends and colleagues.
SDL/Alterian
SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that allows you to create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
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 that lets you plan, create and distribute content online. 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. The software provides answers to content marketers’ questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
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. Users can publish and schedule updates, access metrics and KPI, follow conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and engage with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands looking for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive media attention they are searching for.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch is a social media monitoring platform that helps marketers capture, analyze and share insights from social data to better prove the value of marketing in the socialsphere.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a Google Plus education resource. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles in which you are included. 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 lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on customers and influencers, manage multiple profiles and schedule posts, and view Twitter analytics 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 customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and discussions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
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 integrates with WordPress and can be used instead of the built-in WordPress commenting system to expand the power of social discussions online. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with full featured, clean social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of mentions and messages. 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 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 creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on 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 media search engine which allows you to search Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, company, or products using a blogger outreach tool that lets you filter, search, and sort 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 friends, fans, and followers haven’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 Know About It system from the previous 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 marketing, management, and analytics tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure 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, create 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, search queries, and hashtags are performing on Twitter. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.
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. Analytics are presented in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with 16 Twitter platforms (Mention, Shoutlet, Lithium, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, 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, consumers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. 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 provides all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends 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 makes it easy to discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.
RetweetRank
RetweetRank lets you get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand.
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 provides easy social media analytics for your data in a single place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful 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 of your Twitter and Facebook 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 intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of agencies and leading brands around the world. Users can cut through social noise, find conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage their 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 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 channels. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable 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 to find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, fast, and affordable social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus and many more.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, teams can share content with their customers, social networks, and prospects.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides a number of different ways of searching for users that could 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 then notifies those users via mobile notifications and email, and if they are interested, they can check your profile and follow back.
Followadder
Followadder provides you with automated social networking management tools. 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. Twellow lets you search many relevant business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other social service you use. Find out which of your tweets, posts, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets users on Twitter access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results of what your friends are sharing online above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.
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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 on this site.
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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)