In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of tracking tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen to online social conversations
- Identify key buying signals.
With this information, you can start a meaningful conversation with buyers and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use to monitor social media activity. If you are looking for ways to increase sales with social media, then here are 30 social analytics tools & resources for improving social media marketing ROI.
WordPress Tools - Social Media Tracking
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, or your competition 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. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most useful tools available online for keeping up with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and monitoring what is being written about you and your business online. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only only a useful tool for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for gathering news about people, companies, and any other topic 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, blog post, news update, press release, a tweet, video, 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 how to set up Google alerts here: How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. You 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 collaborate with teams.
Hootsuite is one of the most used 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.
More information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you.
You can 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 also provides mobile apps and a web browser extension.
To learn more, go here: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(Social Metrics Social Plugin For WordPress)
Social Metrics is a WordPress plugin that tracks social activity from leading social media networks like Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Digg, and LinkedIn.
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 auto-update functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article on SocialMetrics. For more details, go here: SocialMetrics Social Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin accounts can be very time-consuming. To get all of these tasks done usually requires using different plugins, applications, and tools. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single 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 and posting tool, built-in bookmarklet, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and more.
To learn more, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a robust 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, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that lets you 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 displays data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
Go here to learn more: 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, contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends, and explore and grow your social graph..
Go here for more information: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with a set of easy to use tools to empower you to work smarter and faster with Twitter.
ManageFlitter lets you sort your followers and following lists using a range of criteria, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, search twitter bios to easily 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.
More info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring tool for SMBs, content marketers, online marketers, community managers, and analysts. Beevolve allows you to track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement and sales, sentiment, buzz, and more of posts.
Go here to learn more: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to see how your brand is mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics across more than 30 social media channels. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on those social sites, and what areas can be improved.
For more information, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention allows anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful, free tools like Google Analytics can also help you track posts made to your social media sites.
Hootsuite has published a six-step tutorial that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add social buttons to your website for commenting, sharing, and linking social plugins and commenting features to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on Facebook’s social platform.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Insights can help you see when users are on Facebook. This can help improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have the most shares, likes, and comments and to learn about user demographics. You can then use this information to publish targeted content when your audience is on Facebook.
Go here to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a breakdown of your profile visits, tweet impressions, top tweets, followers, and top tweets linking to you.
The Twitter 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.com – Tweet activity)
To learn more, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to publishers.
You can measure views, user demographics, sources of traffic, total estimated earning from playbacks, how long users watch videos, and more.
For more details, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore 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 your customers want.
More information: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media-Related Applications
New tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related applications. 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. It lets you create professional and personal task 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 lets you create engaging digital experiences with your customers.
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, 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. 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 content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat runs 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can schedule and publish updates, track conversations, 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 viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands searching 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 that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a Google Plus education resource. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles following your profile. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of 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 analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contax.io monitors your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail that can help you choose when to follow back.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your marketing, sales organizations, and customer service..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog comments and discussions. Millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Facebook and Twitter. 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 sharing media simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides real-time chat that lets you quickly send and receive messages to any of your online friends, 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 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.
Meltwater Icerocket
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 software that lets you search, sort, and filter 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, location, 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 your 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 change 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 past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool for Pinterest. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot helps you grow Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a free 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 allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, searches, and your keywords. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports with the estimated reach of your tweets based on various methods of measuring performance.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring tool that allows you to track #hashtags, URLs, and keywords on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their performance results using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform (Twitter.com, Spredfast, Twilert, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, interest, 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. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. 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 users with all the tools they 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 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 lets you see important key performance indicators such as the visibility of a page in social media.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media analytics that tell you how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. You can create, manage, and optimize all your Twitter and Facebook 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 tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of leading brands and agencies around the globe. Users can cut through social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure their digital reputation, manage 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 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 networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the audiences and communities that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. 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, simple, and fast 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, your teams can share content with their customers, prospects, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides multiple ways of searching for users that could be interested 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 then notifies those users via email and mobile notifications, and interested users can check your profile and follow you 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, 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 many 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 can visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other service you use. You can quickly learn which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam gives you search results of what your friends are sharing online on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addictomatic lets you 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 displays your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a 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 WordPress to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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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)