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, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on social conversations online
- Identify buying signals.
With this information, you can start meaningful conversations with your audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use for monitoring social media content. If you are looking for smarter ways to improve your business results with social media, then here are 25+ social monitoring tools for helping you gain a better understanding of your ideal audience.
Social Media Tracking Tools For WordPress Users
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a free, simple and easy way to access information about what is happening in your niche or industry that will save you a massive 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 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 is being published about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for sourcing the latest news about people, brands, 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 robots crawl a new web site, press release, blog post, 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 how to create a Google alert here: How To Set Up Google Alerts
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track 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 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.
Go here to learn more: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule 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 the web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app.
More information: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics Pro WordPress Social Analytics Plugin)
SocialMetricsPro is a plugin for WordPress that monitors social activity across many leading social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Digg, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, 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, one-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
If you want to learn more about SocialMetricsPro, refer to this article: SocialMetrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketing campaign. You can easily engage your audiences, manage your social media networks, schedule messages, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful social and marketing features: image-sharing templates, social stream, smart inbox tool, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and much more.
To learn more, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a robust 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, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
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 on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize your data by customers or business, 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 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.
More info: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
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 is a social monitoring tool designed for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, online marketers, content marketers, and community managers. Beevolve lets you monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales and engagement, social sentiment, buzz, and more of posts from a single platform.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring service that lets you monitor brand mentions across different social media properties.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics across dozens of social sites. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
For more information, go here: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention allows anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
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 offers apps for mobile devices and desktop users.
Visit this website to learn more: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just an analytics tool that tracks visitor behavior, web page views, website traffic, your website’s best performing content, etc., it can also track posts made to your social accounts.
Hootsuite has published a great six-step tutorial on how to track social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you integrate like, share, and follow social plugins and commenting features with your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This lets you see how your site is performing on the Facebook platform.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Page Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help you track when your target audience is on Facebook. You can then use this information to improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most shares, likes, and comments and to learn about your the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.
Go here to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a breakdown of your profile views, followers, tweets, 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 better plan your strategy for marketing Twitter.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
For more details, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to publishers.
You can see demographics, views, traffic sources, video viewing duration, estimated earnings from video playbacks, etc.
For more information, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. You can get data about your audience and learn what they want more of.
For more information, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Web Applications
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 applications. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal to-do lists and share your lists with family, friends and colleagues.
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
Create social Q&A communities. 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. 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. This tool provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content more easily discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers can access metrics and KPI, follow conversations, publish and schedule updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your favorite social network or blog and interact with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands looking to promote their services and products with bloggers who are willing to write content designed to bring brands the positive attention they are looking 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 an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google Plus. 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 your GooglePlus 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 followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that can help you choose when to follow back.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will never miss another comment about your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and social media discussions on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening on social media, and use that information to make informed business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a social tool that aims to help improve conversations online. Millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable use Disqus.
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 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 and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with images, audio, or videos, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online using social collaboration.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social 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 products, company, or clients using a blogger outreach tool 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 makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on topics, location, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence using the “Klout Score”, which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. 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
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 past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool for Pinterest users. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest 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 free bookmarklet, create pin alerts, find which are your top performing boards and pins, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, search queries, hashtags, and keywords are performing 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 search tracking application that allows you to track keywords, URLs, and hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Users can view their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with 16 Twitter platforms (Hootsuite, TweetDeck, MarketMeSuite, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, and real-time social monitoring 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 online merchants, bloggers, and consumers by tagging images on the web. Approved users 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 users with all the tools they 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
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 for 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
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
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 all of your data in one place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media analytics that tell you 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 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 the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage consumer relationships and boost the ROI of their social activities.
Sysomos
Sysomos monitors billions of conversations and helps 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 in real-time and historically across all social channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into communities that matter 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 many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides fast, simple, and affordable social media monitoring and social analytics insights including trends, keyword discovery, automated sentiment analysis & influence scoring.
TrapIt
Trapit is lets you easily support your sales enablement, social selling, and employee advocacy efforts by providing relevant content to your employees. With one click of a button, teams can share content with their social networks, prospects, and customers.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides different ways to search for users that might be interested in your brand. Once you find your targeted group of users, you can easily interact with users by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter then notifies those users via email and mobile notifications, and if they are interested, they can check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides automated social networking Instagram 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
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search for Twitter followers in hundreds of relevant 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 Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other social service you use. Learn which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets users on Twitter access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that gives you search results of what your friends are sharing on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.
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 using the WP CMS software 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)