In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of monitoring tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen to online social conversations
- Identify key buying signals.
This information will let you start meaningful conversations with prospects online and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies you can use to monitor social media content. If you are searching for cost-effective ways to improve your business results using social media, then here are the best social analytics tools for businesses and WordPress users.
WordPress And Social Media – Useful Social Monitoring Resources
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, and your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free and simple way to find out what is new 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
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
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, brands and companies, and monitoring what other people post online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only only a great tool for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering news about people, companies, and any other subject you want to know about.
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, blog post, press release, news update, a video, tweet, or any other content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple step-by-step tutorial on setting up alerts with Google here: How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social profiles 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, 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 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 (including their app directory), and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
More information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you at spaced intervals.
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 for iOS and Android devices.
For more details, go here: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(SocialMetricsPro)
SocialMetrics is a WordPress plugin that tracks social activity across many leading social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Digg, and LinkedIn.
Some of the powerful features included in Social Metrics Pro include Excel-like conditional formatting, built-in and external widgets, sort, search and filter data, export data capabilities, 1-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article on SocialMetrics here: SocialMetrics WordPress Social Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for online marketers)
Posting to Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, and Linkedin can be very time-consuming. To get all of these tasks done usually requires different tools, web applications, or plugins. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one dashboard with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, viral video finder, built-in reply to Facebook comments, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and more.
For more information, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a premium 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 custom reports, 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 media 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 quickly and easily organize data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and 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..
Go here for 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 by a range of criteria, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, easily search inside your Twitter stream to find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out who isn’t following you back, and more.
Go here for more information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool for SMBs, community managers, analysts, online marketers, and content marketers. Beevolve lets you track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, buzz, sentiment, etc. of all posts.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you monitor brand mentions on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics and gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across social sites.
More information: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention is built on a simple idea of allowing anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows you to collaborate with other team members.
More information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful tools like Google Analytics can also help track social media campaign links.
Hootsuite has published a six-step tutorial on how to track social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social plugins to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on the Facebook social platform.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Page Insights can be viewed by any administrators of your page and can help you with your marketing efforts by allowing you to better understand page performance.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about your audience demographics. You can then use this data to publish content when your posts are most likely to reach more targeted people.
Go here to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a break down of your profile visits, top tweets, tweet impressions, followers, and tweets linking to you.
Twitter’s Analytics dashboard also provides you with useful information about your tweets in the form of Tweet highlights, allowing you to better plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
For more information, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to video publishers.
You can track traffic sources, views, user demographics, estimated earnings from playbacks, video viewing time, and more.
For more details, visit this site: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what Pins and boards people like most, what they save from your website, what devices people are using, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin new content. With Pin insights, you can use the data to improve the way you pin.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Tools
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.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related services. Keep in mind that 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 professional and personal to-do lists and share your 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 online consumers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, view 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 has been acquired by ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content. Appinions’ technology enables customers to optimize all stages of the content marketing lifecycle. Appinions enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. This tool provides answers to questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content more easily discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is a powerful data analytics platform that delivers insights from social media analytics. It is a highly scalable social media analytics and management platform. Viralheat offers predictive social analytics and a comprehensive social media management stream combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can publish and schedule updates, track conversations, access metrics and KPI, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your blog or favorite social network and interact with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands looking for ways to promote their products and services with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive media attention they are searching for.
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 featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct 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 your Google Plus profile and it will start tracking your circles.
Commun.it
Commun.it lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on customers and influencers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and view Twitter analytics data.
Contax.io
Contax.io is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks 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 customer service flow and discussions on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
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 aims to help improve conversations online. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with full featured, clean social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. Echofon for Twitter automatically keeps unread tweets in sync between apps 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 photos or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with images, videos, or audio, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, privately or publicly, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software that lets you filter, sort, and search to find and prioritize your blogger outreach based on which bloggers are active and building communities on popular social networks. GroupHigh makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on topics, content, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a social media monitoring and performance analyzing 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 friends, fans, and followers haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares change 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 collected 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 Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest management, marketing, and analytics tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, 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 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, search queries, keywords, and hashtags 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 social performance.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media tracking service that lets you track hashtags, keywords, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their performance metrics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform (Twitter.com, TweetDeck, Spinklr, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, and activity tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links online merchants, bloggers, and consumers by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. Users can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind is a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution provides users with all the tools they need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends in the data and instantly route insights back to the enterprise.
Unified Social / PageLevel
PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, was acquired by Unified Social in January 2013. Since being acquired, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated in the Unified Social 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 the audiences, conversations, and competitors that matter to you across all social channels.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media analytics that let you see how your social performance stacks against wider industry benchmarks and the competition. You can create, manage, and optimize all 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 long-term brand performance.
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 globe. Users can cut through social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure their online reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost the ROI of their social activities.
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. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying on any topic both historically and in real-time across all social channels. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into communities that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment allows businesses to engage with everyone, everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, simple, and fast social media monitoring.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With one click of a button, your teams can share content with their social networks, customers, and prospects.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides different ways of searching for users that might be interested in your brand. After finding your targeted group of users, you can easily interact with them by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter then notifies those users via email and mobile notifications, and interested users can check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides automated Instagram management software. 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, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search for Twitter followers in many business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube 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 is based in the UK and lets Twitter users access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results of what your friends are sharing online above your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly can help you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet displays your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
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We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about using the WP software to grow your business online, please see other posts we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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