In Part One 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 tracking tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Monitor and listen to online social conversations
- Identify consumer buying signals.
This information will allow you to start a meaningful conversation with your audience and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you’ve been looking for cost-effective ways to increase sales with social media, then check out our list of 25+ social media management tools
for business owners and WordPress users.
Social Media Tracking Tools For WordPress Users
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, and your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free and simple way to access information about what is going on in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge amount of 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 and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and monitor what other people write about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only only a great tool for managing your reputation online, but also for receiving information about people, companies, and any other topic you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots crawl a new web site, blog post, news update, press release, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
If you would like to learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this step-by-step tutorial: How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, 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 (including their app directory), and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
More info: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will post the content 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
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin)
SocialMetrics is a plugin for WordPress that lets you track Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your WordPress Admin 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 auto-update functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a detailed article on Social Metrics Pro. For more info, see this article: Social Metrics Pro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketing campaign. You can easily engage your audiences, manage your social media networks, schedule messages, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: pre-made image-sharing designs, royalty-free picture search tool, bulk content importing and scheduling, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and more.
Go here for more details: 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 social Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and custom reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here for more information: 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, website performance and blogs, and returns 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.
Visit this site to learn more: 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, 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 powerful tools that help you 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 influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out who isn’t following you back, and more.
More information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social media monitoring tool designed for SMBs, online marketers, community managers, content marketers, and analysts. It lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, sentiment, buzz, etc. of all your posts.
Go here for more details: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring tool that lets you see brand mentions across different social media properties.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics and gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across social media sites.
To learn more, visit this site: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for businesses, agencies, CEOs, marketers, etc..
Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your business online, you have the ability to detect this, and access to intelligent, actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention has developed apps for both desktop and mobile users.
More information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that tools like Google Analytics can also help monitor posts made to your social media sites.
Hootsuite has published a great step-by-step guide that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you integrate like, follow, and share social buttons and commenting features with your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your site is performing on the Facebook platform.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help you track the number of active users. You can then use this data to improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most comments, likes, and shares and to learn about your audience demographics. You can then use this data to publish content when your content is most likely to reach more targeted people.
Go here for more information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a breakdown of your top tweets, profile views, tweet impressions, followers, and top tweets linking to you.
Twitter’s 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 information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets you see how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can measure views, audience demographics, traffic sources, video viewing time, earnings from playbacks, etc.
Visit this site to learn more: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps 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 new content. You can use the information to improve the way you pin.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Tools
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 applications. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please contact us.
Wunderlist
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 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, 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. Appinions’ technology enables 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. The software provides answers to questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
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 combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can access metrics and KPI, monitor conversations, schedule and publish updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, 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 products and services with bloggers who are willing to write content designed to bring brands the positive media attention they are searching for.
BrandWatch
Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that allows you to collect, analyze and report on your social media data.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCount is a Google Plus education resource. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ 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, 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 followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that helps 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 helps you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your marketing, sales organizations, and customer service..
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. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. 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 to quickly send and receive messages to any of your online friends, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post photos and videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, 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.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software that lets you search, filter, and sort 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 location, content, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout brings influencers and brands together, rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, and ranks users social influence using a “Klout Score”. 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 lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. 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 access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest management, analytics, and marketing tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot is a Pinterest-based social media marketing platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Multiple accounts can be added to the tool and you can view how your pins are performing, find which are your top performing boards, etc. using built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for search queries, keywords, and hashtags. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for your 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. Users can monitor their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Mention, Attensity, MarketMeSuite, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, 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 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 all the tools you 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
PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, was acquired by Unified Social in January 2013. Since then, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated in the Unified Social 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
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 competitors, audiences, and conversations that matter to you across all social channels.
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 Twitter and Facebook ads in one place, quickly identify your best content and top posting times, gain powerful insights about your audience, and track long-term brand performance.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social intelligence 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 digital reputation, manage their 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 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 communities that matter most 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 many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, fast, and simple 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, social networks, and prospects.
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 automated social networking management software. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, schedule posts, follow/unfollow Instagram users, like back photos, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search hundreds of business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other social service you use. You can quickly know which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based service that allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam gives you search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly can help you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet shows your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a powerful tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.
***
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 on this site.
***
"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group