In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is 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 allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to demographics, their interests, etc.
- Listen to online social conversations
- Identify consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can engage in meaningful conversations with prospects online and pitch them information about your products or services.
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 ways to improve your business results using social media, then check out this list of 25+ free or cost-effective social media monitoring tools
for business owners and WordPress users.
WordPress Social Media Tracking Tools
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, and your competitors on social media)
Is there a simple and easy 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
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people, brands and companies, and monitor what is being said about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering information about people, brands, companies, and any subject you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots index a new web page, blog post, press release, news update, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
If you need to learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts - Three Quick And Easy Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from an intuitive dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track 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 teams.
Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
Visit this website to learn more: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will then automatically 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 the web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app.
Go here for more info: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(Social Metrics Pro WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin)
SocialMetricsPro is a plugin for WordPress that lets you monitor social activity across many leading social media networks like Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon.
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 auto-update functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a detailed article about Social Metrics Pro here: Social Metrics Pro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for entrepreneurial marketers)
Posting to WordPress, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook can be time-consuming. To get all of these tasks done usually requires using different applications, and tools, plugins. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one single location with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: built-in image-sharing designs, royalty-free picture search tool, opt-in marketing tool, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and more.
More info: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium 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, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
For more details, visit this website: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management tool that lets you 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 displays data from your social channels using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can quickly and easily organize data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
For more details, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze, 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
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides 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.
Go here for more details: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring tool for SMBs, analysts, community managers, online marketers, and content marketers. It lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement and sales, buzz, sentiment, etc. for those posts from one platform.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you see brand mentions across different social media platforms.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics and gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across social sites, and which areas can be improved.
More information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention provides social media monitoring for businesses, agencies, CEOs, marketers, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on blogs, websites, news, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in real time.
Mention uses algorithms that take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows collaborative monitoring (sharing alerts and assigning mentions with other team members), and is cross-device compatible.
Go here for more information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only a free and powerful web analytics tool used to monitor visitor behavior, website traffic, page view duration, identify your site’s best and worst performing content, etc., it can also monitor posts made to your social sites.
Visit the Hootsuite blog for a six-step guide on tracking your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social media plugins to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. This lets you analyze how your site is performing on the Facebook social networking platform.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
Facebook Page Insights allows you to analyze metrics like page likes, engagement, post reach, etc. to help you with your business marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have attracted the most comments, likes, and shares and to learn about your the demographics of your audience. You can then use this data to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.
To learn more, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a monthly break down of your tweets, followers, tweet impressions, profile visits, 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 Twitter strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
For more information, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to video publishers.
You can measure views, traffic sources, viewer demographics, video viewing duration, revenue from playbacks, etc.
Go here to learn more: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics lets you see what Pins and boards people like most, what they save from your website, what devices people are using, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. You can use the data to improve the way you pin.
Go here for more info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Tools And Services
Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses take advantage 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 let us know.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional lists and share your lists with colleagues, family and friends.
SDL/Alterian
SDL Web (formerly Alterian) is 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, 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 enables customers to optimize every stage of the content marketing lifecycle. Appinions enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. This tool provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat runs a powerful data analytics application 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. Users can publish and schedule updates, monitor conversations, access metrics and KPI, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your blog or favorite social network and engage with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the types of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.
BrandWatch
accurately listen to conversations about your brand, your market, or your products.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a Google Plus education tool. 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
Contax.io is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that can help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening on social media, and use that information to make informed business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that facilitates the growth and spread of online communities through blog discussions. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering just about every 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 sharing media simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides simple, streamlined navigation and an uncluttered Facebook experience, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post photos or videos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with audio, 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 search engine which allows you to search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach tool that lets you filter, search, and sort 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 content, location, topics, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence using 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 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 past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest users. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results across the Pinterest network.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot helps you gain Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, 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 boards and pins, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, your keywords, and searches. 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. Analytics are displayed to users in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms 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 links consumers, online merchants, and bloggers by tagging images on the web. Users can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind provides a complete social data platform for conducting social business One web-based solution provides users with all the tools they 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
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 with Unified Social’s 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 help you grow and manage your social media presence.
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 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 long-term brand performance.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social media intelligence tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of leading brands and agencies around the world. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure their online reputation, manage consumer relationships and boost the ROI of their social activities.
Sysomos
Sysomos provides powerful social media analytics that lets you monitor, analyze, gather insights and make decisions aimed at creating better products and services 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. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into the audiences and communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. 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, 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 a list.
Followadder
Followadder provides you with automated social networking management software. 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, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search for followers on Twitter in many business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other service you use. You can quickly find out which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is a UK-based website that lets users on Twitter access upcoming trends and patterns posted by 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
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly lets you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine 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.
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We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress to grow your business online, please see other articles and tutorials 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)