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 examine a number of monitoring tools that let you:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen in on social conversations online
- Identify key buying signals.
This information will allow you to start a meaningful conversation with a targeted audience and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use to monitor social media content. If you’ve been searching for smarter ways to increase sales with social media, then here are dozens of free or cost-effective social media management tools and resources.
WordPress Resources - Media Monitoring
(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 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
(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 and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people, brands and companies, and track what other people post online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering information about people, companies, or any topic you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web page, blog post, news update, 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 alerts with Google here: Google Alerts – A Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social profiles 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, share the workload amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations, and collaborate with teams.
Hootsuite is one of the leading 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.
For more details, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will then automatically post the content for you.
You can schedule updates for a day, week, or month. Scheduling times are preset, but you can change these in your settings. In addition to using a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.
More information: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(SocialMetricsPro WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin)
SocialMetricsPro is a WordPress plugin that tracks social activity across leading social media networks like Twitter, GooglePlus, Facebook, Pinterest, Digg, LinkedIn, 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.
If you want to learn more about Social Metrics, refer to this article: SocialMetricsPro WordPress Social Analytics Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for entrepreneurial marketers)
Posting to Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress, and Twitter is time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done you usually need to use different applications, or software, plugins. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one single location.
Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, social stream, built-in reply to Facebook comments, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and much more.
More information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a robust 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, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
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, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and displays your social channel data on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
Go here for more details: 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, compare Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers, 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 Twitter Analytics
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of easy to use tools to empower you to 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, 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 details: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform designed for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, community managers, content marketers, and online marketers. It allows you to monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales, engagement, and conversion ROI, sentiment, buzz, etc. of all your posts.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social measuring service that allows you to see brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics across dozens of social media channels. It gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
More info: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for every type of business, agencies, CEOs, marketers, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on news sites, blogs, websites, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows you to collaborate with different team members.
More information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that applications like Google Analytics can also help you track social media campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a useful six-step guide on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social plugins to your website for commenting, following, and sharing social plugins and commenting features to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your content is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
The Facebook Page Insights dashboard can be viewed by any page administrators and can help improve your marketing efforts by allowing you to track active users on your Page.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most shares, likes, and comments and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish targeted content when your audience is on Facebook.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a break down of your followers, profile visits, tweet impressions, top tweets, and top 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 better plan your Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your YouTube channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, real-time, earnings, engagement, and watch-time reports.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin new content. With Pin insights, you can get data about your audiences so you can learn what your customers want.
Go here for more information: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Web Applications
Many new tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses make sense of social media.
Here are some other social media applications. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please contact us.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal to-do 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 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 receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. You can optimize 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 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 blog or favorite social network and interact with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the kinds of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch is a social media monitoring platform that lets marketers capture, analyze and share insights from social data to better evaluate the value of marketing social.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a Google Plus education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus 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 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 to 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 discussions on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
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 social tool that aims to help improve conversations online. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.
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 videos or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with videos, images, or audio, 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
Icerocket is a social search engine which allows you to search Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, products, or company using 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’s blog search makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on location, content, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, brings influencers and brands together, and ranks users social influence using a “Klout Score”. 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 lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. 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 Know About It 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 tool for Pinterest users. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot is a Pinterest-based social media marketing platform for small and medium-sized businesses. You can add multiple accounts and view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. using built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for search queries, hashtags, and keywords. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media tracking tool that lets you track URLs, keywords, and hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Analytics are displayed in an 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 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. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. You can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind is 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 social data and instantly route insights back to the enterprise.
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 in the Unified Social 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 lets you find a targeted audience, measure and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics lets you see important key performance indicators such as the visibility of a page in social media.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand competitors, conversations, and the audiences that matter to you across every social channel.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media analytics that let you see 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 tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of agencies and leading brands around the world. Users can cut through social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure online reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.
Sysomos
Sysomos monitors billions of conversations and helps 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 networks. 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 what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through various channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides fast, simple, and affordable social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus 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 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 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. 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 lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other social service you use. You can quickly discover which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets users on Twitter view upcoming trends and patterns posted by 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 chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet 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 monitoring and analytics 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 using the WordPress content publishing platform to grow your business online, please see other tutorials and articles we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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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)