In Part One 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 examine a number of monitoring tools, services and applications that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Monitor social conversations online
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
This information lets you start meaningful conversations with your audience and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use to monitor social media content. If you’ve been looking for better ways to increase sales with social media, then here are the best social media management tools
for businesses and WordPress users.
WordPress And Social Media Measurement
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a free and simple way to access information about what is going on in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge 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 one of the simplest and most useful tools available online for keeping up with news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what is being said online about you and your business. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only only a useful social media monitoring tool for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering information about people, companies, or any subject you are following.
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, press release, blog post, news update, a video, tweet, or any other content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to set up Google alerts here: Google Alerts – A Simple & Easy Step-By-Step Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, 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, and collaborate with team members.
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.
Go here for more information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and it will be posted for you.
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 a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a web browser extension.
More information: Buffer
Social Metrics
(SocialMetricsPro)
Social Metrics Pro is a plugin for WordPress that monitors social signals from leading social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Digg, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon.
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, one-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.
Go here to learn more about SocialMetricsPro: SocialMetricsPro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any marketing campaign. You can easily manage your social networks, engage with your audiences, 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 design templates, viral video finder and posting tool, video marketing tool, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and more.
More information: 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 (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: 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.
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 organize your data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
To learn more, go here: 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, breakdown your followers by social authority, tweet count, follower count, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
For more details, go here: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with 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 the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out which inactive accounts you follow, and more.
More info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social monitoring platform designed for SMBs, community managers, online marketers, content marketers, and analysts. It allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement and sales, social buzz, sentiment, etc. for those posts.
For more details, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to see brand mentions across different social platforms.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics. It gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across social media sites, and which areas you can improve your marketing on.
Go here for more information: 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 business 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.
Visit this website to learn more: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only a great analytics software application for tracking and reporting website traffic, visitor behavior, web page view duration, what prospects are searching for on your website, etc., it can also help you track posts made to your social media sites.
Hootsuite has published a tutorial on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add share, follow, and like social media buttons and commenting features to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your campaigns are performing on Facebook’s social networking platform.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
The Facebook Page Insights dashboard provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help better understand metrics about page performance. You can then use this data to improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most comments, likes, and shares and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this data to publish content when your posts are most likely to reach more targeted people.
More info: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a break down of your tweets, followers, profile views, tweet impressions, and tweets linking back 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)
To learn more, visit this website: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, real time, engagement, earnings, and watch-time reports.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics helps you see what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. You can get information that helps you learn what your customers want.
Go here for more information: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Applications
New tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses make sense of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media tools. Keep in mind that new web technologies continually evolve. If anything changes in the list below, please contact us.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal lists and share your 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 receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions, makers of an influence analytics marketing platform built on patented natural language processing and social network analysis technology is now part of ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content. Appinions’ deep data science patent protected technology allows customers to optimize every stage 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?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. 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. Customers can monitor conversations, access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish updates, 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 interact with viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the types of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.
BrandWatch
accurately listen to conversations about your brand, your products or your market.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCount 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, 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 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 the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, 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 integrates with WordPress and can be used instead of the built-in WordPress commenting system to expand the power of social discussions online. Millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with 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 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 creative social media tool. If you work with sounds, videos, or images, you can save moments 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.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software that lets you sort, search, 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 content, location, topics, 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
KnowAboutIt is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. The stories are gathered 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 Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot helps you gain 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 allows you to measure how well your tweets, search queries, hashtags, and keywords 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 performance.
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 over a dozen Twitter platforms (Mention, SocialFlow, Spinklr, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, interest, and real-time 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 consumers, bloggers, and online merchants 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 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 trends or moments in social 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 being acquired, 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 provides powerful tools designed to grow and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides easy social media analytics for your data in a single place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media analytics that let you see how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. 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 long-term brand performance.
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 social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure 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 that allow you to create better services and products 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. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the audiences that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, affordable, and fast social media monitoring.
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, your teams can share content with their customers, prospects, and social networks.
Tweepi
With Tweepi, you can follow a @user’s followers, follow a @user’s friends, follow using a Twitter list, and follow by copy/pasting a list.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated Instagram management tools. 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
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search hundreds of 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 Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other social service you use. You can quickly find out which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful 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 the benefits of 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)