In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen in on social conversations online
- Identify consumer buying signals.
This information lets you start a meaningful conversation with your audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use to monitor social media activity. If you’ve been searching for cost-effective ways to increase sales with social media, then here are the top social management tools & resources.
Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a free, simple and easy way to know what is new in your industry or niche that will save you time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
Google Alerts is one of the easiest and most useful online tools available for keeping up with news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and tracking what is being published online about you and your business. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically receiving the latest news about people, brands, companies, and any other topic you want to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots index a new web site, blog post, news update, press release, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: How To Set Up Google Alerts In 3 Simple & Easy Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social profiles from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service. 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 collaborate with team members.
Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many social networks, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Go here for more details: 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 out intervals over the day.
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 for Android and iOS devices.
To learn more, visit this website: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(SocialMetrics)
Social Metrics Pro is a plugin for WordPress that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
Some of the powerful features included in Social Metrics 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.
We have written a comprehensive article on Social Metrics. Go here to learn more: Social Metrics WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any marketing campaign. You can easily schedule messages, manage your social media networks, engage with your audiences, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, the ability to spy on your competitors, advanced link share customization for Facebook, unlimited social account management (agency license), and more.
To learn more, visit this site: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
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 CRM, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
For more details, go here: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that allows you to track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.
Social Report tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, website performance and blogs, and returns data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
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 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 followers and following lists by 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 the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out which inactive accounts you are following, and more.
To learn more, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social monitoring platform for SMBs, content marketers, analysts, community managers, and online marketers. Beevolve lets you track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales and engagement, sentiment, buzz, etc. for those posts.
To learn more, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social media monitoring service that allows you to monitor how your business and brand is mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics across more than 35 social sites. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing across those social media sites, and what areas can be improved.
Go here for more details: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for businesses, CEOs, marketers, agencies, etc..
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
Visit this site to learn more: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful, free software applications like Google Analytics can also help you track links from your WordPress website or blog to your social media accounts.
Hootsuite has published a useful 6-step guide on how to track social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you integrate share, like, and follow social media buttons and commenting features with your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your content is performing on the Facebook social platform.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
The Facebook Insights dashboard tracks the number of active users to help you improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts have attracted the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this data to publish content when your content is most likely to reach your target audience.
Go here for more information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a breakdown of your followers, tweets, profile visits, tweet impressions, and 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 plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
More info: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to video publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your YouTube channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the real time, overview, revenue, watch-time, and engagement reports.
Go here for more details: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
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, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. You can get data about your audience and learn what they want more of.
To learn more, visit this site: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Services & Aplications
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 new web technologies are continually evolving. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional lists and share your lists with family, colleagues and friends.
SDL/Alterian
SDL Web (formerly Alterian) is an all-in-one global web experience management solution that allows you to create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you 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 that lets you plan, create and distribute content online. Appinions’ technology allows customers to optimize every stage 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 ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat (formerly ArgyleSocial – a social media marketing platform for marketers) is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat runs 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 schedule and publish updates, follow conversations, access metrics and KPI, 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 engage with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands looking to promote their services and products with bloggers who are willing to write content aimed at bringing brands positive media attention.
BrandWatch
Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that lets you collect, analyze and report on your social media data.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCount is a GooglePlus education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles following your profile. 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 lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on influencers and customers, 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 that can 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 social media discussions on channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your sales organizations, marketing, and customer service..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog discussions. Millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with full featured, clean social apps for Twitter and Facebook. 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, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater 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 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 location, topics, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that helps you analyze user’s social media 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 affect 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 KnowAboutIt system from the previous 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 Pinterest analytics, marketing, and management tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot helps you gain 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, 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 keywords, searches, and hashtags. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for your given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media tracking application that allows users to track URLs, keywords, and hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and 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 consumers, bloggers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. 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 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 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 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 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 competitors, audiences, and conversations that matter to you across all social channels.
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 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 media intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global agencies and brands. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage 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 both in real-time and historically on any topic across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and get insights into the audiences that matter 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 various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, affordable, 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, teams can share content with their social networks, prospects, and customers.
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 lists.
Followadder
Followadder provides users 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
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search dozens of relevant 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 lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other service you use. Discover which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets Twitter users access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that gives you search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.
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We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress to grow your business online, please see other tutorials we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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