In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides 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, segment, organize and target users according to specific demographics, their interests, etc.
- Listen to online social conversations
- Identify buying signals.
This information will allow you to engage in 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 better ways to improve your business results using social media, then check out our list of 29 great social media management tools for better understanding your customers.
WordPress Social Media Tracking – Useful Resources
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, or your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple and easy (and free) way to find out what is going on in your niche or industry that would save you time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
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 other people are saying online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically sourcing the latest news about people, brands, companies, and any subject you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots crawl a new web page, blog post, press release, news update, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
To learn how to set up Google alerts, see this simple tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from an intuitive dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, quickly 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 offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
More information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue 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 for iOS and Android devices.
More info: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress)
SocialMetricsPro is a plugin for WordPress that tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WordPress Admin 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, one-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article about Social Metrics Pro here: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any business marketing campaign. You can easily engage your audiences, manage your social networks, schedule post messages, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster is ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, viral video finder and posting tool, video marketing tool, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and much more.
Visit this website to learn more: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a robust social media management tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in social Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management tool that allows you to track and manage all of your social media accounts from one place.
Social Report tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and displays your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
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, contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends, and explore and grow your social graph..
More information: 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, search twitter bios to easily find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, clean up and manage who you follow, and more.
More info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, community managers, content marketers, online marketers, and analysts. Beevolve lets you monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales and engagement, buzz, sentiment, and more for those posts.
Go here for more details: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social measuring tool that allows you to see brand mentions across different social media properties.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics and gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
More info: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention is a social monitoring tool for every type of business, marketers, agencies, CEOs, etc..
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, 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 collaborative monitoring.
For more details, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just a web analytics software application used to monitor web traffic, unique page views and view duration, visitor behaviour, identify your site’s worst performing content, etc., it can also help you track posts made from your WP site to your social media campaigns.
Visit the Hootsuite blog for a tutorial on tracking your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social media plugins to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your campaigns are performing on Facebook’s social platform.
(Facebook Insights)
The Facebook Page Insights dashboard helps you better understand metrics about page performance to help improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about your the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish more of the type of content that your audience is interested in.
Visit this site to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a breakdown of your tweet impressions, profile views, followers, tweets, and tweets linking back 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 strategy for marketing Twitter.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
More info: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to publishers.
You can see viewer demographics, views, sources of traffic, estimated revenue from playbacks, average video viewing duration, and more.
To learn more, visit this website: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, what referral traffic you are getting from Pinterest, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. With Pin insights, you can use the information to improve the way you pin.
To learn more, 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.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related services. Keep in mind that new web technologies change. If any of the tools below change, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional task lists and share these lists with friends, family 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
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, 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. 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. The software provides answers to questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can follow conversations, access metrics and KPI, schedule and publish updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you 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 to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the types of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
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 social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a GooglePlus education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles in which you are included. 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 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 to help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
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, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets 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 free service that connects people online through blog discussions. Millions of websites covering pretty much any 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 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 sounds, videos, or images, you can save moments 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 media search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach tool that lets you filter, sort, 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 content, location, topics, 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 friends, fans, and followers haven’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 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 collect and manage content from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application designed specifically for Pinterest users. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance across Pinterest.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a Pinterest-based social media marketing tool for small and medium-sized businesses. You can add multiple accounts and view the performance of your boards and pins with built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, hashtags, search queries, and keywords are performing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for any given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring service that allows you to track keywords, #hashtags, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Users can view their performance results using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, 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 lets you link bloggers, online merchants, 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 for conducting social business One web-based solution gives you all the tools you 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
Unified Social acquired PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, 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 provides powerful tools designed to grow and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand conversations, competitors, and audiences that matter to you across all social channels.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media stats that tell you 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 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 conversations that matter, measure their online reputation, manage consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.
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 channels. 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 fast, affordable, 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 the click of a button, your teams can share content with their social networks, prospects, and customers.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides a number of different ways of searching for users that could be interested in your brand. After finding your targeted group of users, you can then easily interact with them 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 back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated 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, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search for Twitter followers in hundreds of business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other service you use. You can quickly know which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam gives you search results of what your friends are sharing on top of your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet displays your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.
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 the benefits of using the WordPress software to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.
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"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya
The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static web page about your company or products is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s highly connected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your products, brand, and company.
