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 examine a number of tracking tools that let you:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to demographics, their interests, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on social conversations online
- Identify consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can engage in meaningful conversations with your audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies you can use to monitor social media activity. If you are searching for smarter ways to increase sales with social media, then check out this list of more than 25 cost-effective social management tools & resources for business owners and WordPress users.
WordPress And Social Media – Useful Tools For Measuring Social Metrics
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a free and simple way to find out what is happening in your industry or niche 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 about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and tracking what is being published online about you and your business. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically sourcing the latest news about people, companies, or any subject you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, news update, blog post, press release, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to set up Google alerts here: How To Set Up Google Alerts
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social media 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, create and customize analytics reports, streamline workflows amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations, and collaborate with team members.
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 provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
For more information, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will post it 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 is also available as a web browser extension and as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
Go here for more info: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(Social Metrics Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress)
SocialMetrics is a plugin for WordPress that tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
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, 1-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
Go here if you want to learn more Social Metrics: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and WordPress can be very time-consuming and to get all these tasks done usually requires different plugins, tools, and applications. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one location.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: pre-made image-sharing designs, top viral video search tool, built-in reply to Facebook comments, unlimited social account management (agency license), and more.
More info: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a robust tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Visit this website to learn more: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform 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 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 competitor profiles.
Go here for more info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze their tweeting habits, track and sort 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 powerful tools that help you 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 the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, clean up and manage who you follow, and more.
Go here for more details: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve is a social media monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, online marketers, analysts, content marketers, and community managers. It lets you track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement, conversion, and sales metrics, social buzz, sentiment, and more of all posts from a single platform.
Go here for more info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to see brand mentions across various social media properties.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
For more details, visit this site: HowSociable
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 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.
For more details, go here: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only a powerful and free web analytics tool used to track visitor behavior, web page views, website traffic, which pages visitors are departing your site from, etc., it can also track social media campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a useful tutorial on tracking social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add social media buttons to your site for sharing, following, and commenting social media plugins and commenting features to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
Facebook Page Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help better understand how people are engaging with your Page. You can then use this data to improve your 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 audience demographics. You can then use this data to publish relevant posts when your audience is on Facebook.
More info: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a break down of your followers, tweet impressions, tweets, profile visits, and top 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 better plan your strategy for marketing Twitter.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
More info: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the real-time, overview, watch-time, revenue, and engagement reports.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. With Pin insights, you can get information that helps you learn what your customers want.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Tools & Services
New tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
Here are some other social media-related tools. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal lists and share these lists with friends, family 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, view Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. Appinions’ technology allows customers to optimize all stages 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 “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content more easily discoverable?”, 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. Customers can track conversations, access metrics and KPI, publish and schedule updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your favorite social network or blog and engage with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands looking to promote their products and services with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive attention they are searching for.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch is a social monitoring platform that helps marketers capture, analyze and share insights from social data to better prove the value of marketing in the socialsphere.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. 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 your Google+ 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 tracks your followers and friends 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 customer service flow and social media discussions on channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps 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 viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links 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 photos or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with audio, images, or videos, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on 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 allows you to search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, products, or clients using 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 makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on topics, content, location, 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 users haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares change 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 lets you capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application designed specifically for Pinterest users. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a social media marketing tool for small and medium sized businesses using Pinterest. Multiple accounts can be added to the tool and you can view the performance of your pins with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, hashtags, search queries, and keywords are doing on Twitter. TweetReach gives you the estimated potential of the tweets for any given query.
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. Analytic metrics are displayed to users using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform (Twitter.com, SocialFlow, Spinklr, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, 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 links online merchants, bloggers, and consumers 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 you with 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
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 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
RetweetRank lets you get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
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 your Facebook and Twitter 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 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, listen into the conversations that matter, measure 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 that allow you to create better services and products for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both in real-time and historically on any topic across all social channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into the audiences that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, simple, and fast social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Twitter, Google+, Facebook and many more.
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 prospects, customers, 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 lists.
Followadder
Followadder provides you with automated social networking management tools. 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. You can search many business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other social service you use. Know which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos 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 displays search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly can help you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure 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 and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
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 our related posts section below.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)