In Part 1 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 examine a number of tracking tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to demographics, their interests, etc.
- Monitor online social conversations
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
This information lets you engage in meaningful conversations with potential prospects online 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’ve been searching for cost-effective ways to increase sales with social media, then here are the top social monitoring tools that will help you to improve social marketing ROI.
30 Media Tracking Tools That Can Help Grow Your Business Online
(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, and your competition on social media)
Is there a free and simple way to find out what is new in your niche or industry that can save you a massive 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 with news about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and monitor what is being published about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for sourcing the latest news about people, companies, or any topic you are following.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots crawl a new web page, blog post, news update, press release, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: How To Set Up Google Alerts
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. You 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, 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 many social networks, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
To learn more, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will then post the content 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 the web interface, Buffer is also available as a web browser extension and as a mobile app.
More information: Buffer
Social Metrics
(Social Metrics Pro)
SocialMetrics is a plugin that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WP 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, 1-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
Go here if you would like to learn more about SocialMetricsPro: Social Metrics Pro WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to Twitter, WordPress, Linkedin, and Facebook can be very time-consuming. To get all these tasks done usually requires different applications, or tools, plugins. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one location.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, the ability to spy on your competition, smart inbox tool, unlimited social account management (agency license), and much more.
Go here for more info: 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 Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here for more information: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management solution 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 returns your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter on any profile data: bio, location, name, URL, breakdown your followers by social authority, tweet count, follower count, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends, and explore and grow your social graph..
Go here for more details: 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 influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, understand who you are following, and more.
For more information, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool for SMBs, online marketers, analysts, community managers, and content marketers. Beevolve allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales, conversion, and engagement ROI, sentiment, buzz, etc. of all posts from one easy-to-use platform.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to monitor brand mentions on the social web.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics across 36 social sites and delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing across those social media sites.
Go here for more information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention helps any type of business monitor the web.
Mention uses algorithms that take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows collaborative monitoring.
Go here to learn more: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just an analytics software application, it can also help you track your social activities.
Hootsuite has published a tutorial on how to track social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add social media plugins to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This application lets you analyze how your site is performing on Facebook’s platform.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights can be accessed by any page administrators and can help you improve your marketing efforts by allowing you to better understand metrics about page performance.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts have attracted the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish targeted content when your ideal audience is on Facebook.
Visit this website to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a monthly breakdown of your tweets, profile views, followers, tweet impressions, 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 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 the YouTube platform.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the realtime, overview, watch-time, earnings, and engagement reports.
For more information, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you see what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. With Pin insights, you can get data about your audience and learn what they want more of.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Web 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.
Here are some other social media-related tools. Keep in mind that web technologies change. If any of the tools below change, 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 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 your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content. Appinions’ technology allows customers to optimize all stages of the content marketing lifecycle. The ScribbleLive acquisition 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 track conversations, access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your blog or favorite social network and interact with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands looking to promote their products and services with bloggers who are willing to write content designed to bring brands the positive attention they are looking for.
BrandWatch
accurately tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your products or your market.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a Google Plus education resource. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles in which you are included. 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 is a community management tool for building relationships and discovering leads on Twitter.
Contax.io
Contax.io tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that can help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and social media discussions on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps 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 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 videos or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Meltwater Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, company, or products using a blogger outreach software that lets you sort, filter, 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 location, content, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, brings influencers and brands together, and ranks users social influence using a “Klout Score”. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your users haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares affect your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
KnowAboutIt lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are collected from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across the entire Pinterest network.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot helps you gain 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 pins and boards, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, search queries, and specific keywords. 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 to users using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform (Hootsuite, SocialFlow, Spinklr, etc) 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 lets you link bloggers, online merchants, 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 for conducting social business One web-based solution provides all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends in social 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 for 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
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 lets you analyze and understand the audiences, conversations, and competitors that matter to you across every social channel.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats that tell you how your social performance stacks against wider industry benchmarks and the competition. You can create, manage, and optimize all of 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 and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global brands and agencies. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure 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 services and products 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. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, 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 find, mix and share a variety of content through different 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 one click of a button, teams can share content with their customers, prospects, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides different ways of searching for users that might 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 notifies those users via mobile notifications and email, and interested users may check your profile and follow back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated social networking management software. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, follow/unfollow Instagram users, schedule posts, like back photos, automate photo likes and direct messaging, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search dozens of business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other social service you use. Find out which of your tweets, posts, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based service that allows users on Twitter to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
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
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly can help you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
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We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about using WordPress to grow your business online, please see other tutorials and articles we have published on this site.
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