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 look at a number of tracking tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, psychographics, etc.
- Listen to online social conversations
- Identify buying signals.
This information will allow you to start a meaningful conversation with your audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use to monitor social media activity. If you’ve been searching for smarter ways to increase sales with social media, then check out our list of the top social media analytics tools and resources.
WordPress Tools - Media Monitoring
(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, and your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple and easy way to know what is going on in your niche or industry that could save you a massive amount of time doing research? Well, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
Google Alerts is a free, simple and useful tool for keeping up-to-date with the latest news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what other people are posting about you and your business online.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering information about people, companies, or any other subject you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing robots crawl a new web site, news update, blog post, press release, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple step-by-step tutorial on setting up Google alerts here: How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, quickly create and customize analytics reports, streamline workflows amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations from the dashboard, and collaborate with team members.
Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many social networks (including their app directory), 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. You add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will then automatically post it 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 a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.
Go here to learn more: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(Social Metrics WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin)
Social Metrics is a WordPress plugin that tracks social activity across many leading social media networks like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Pinterest.
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 SEO improvement system.
We have written a detailed article about SocialMetrics. Go here to learn more: SocialMetrics WordPress Social Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for entrepreneurial marketers)
Posting to Linkedin, WordPress, Twitter, and Facebook can be very time-consuming. To get all these tasks done usually requires different tools, plugins, or applications. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one single dashboard with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, top viral video finder and posting tool, smart inbox tool, unlimited social media account management (agency license), 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 social CRM, advanced scheduling tools, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
To learn more, visit this website: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
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 returns your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize data by customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
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, track and sort followers, match your activities to gains and losses in followers to give your followers what they like best, find and connect with new influencers in your niche, where they are located, when do they tweet, hone your social graph by following and unfollowing users, etc.
Visit this website to learn more: Followerwonk
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 by a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, easily search inside your Twitter stream to find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, understand who you follow, and more.
Go here for more details: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social media monitoring platform for SMBs, content marketers, community managers, analysts, and online marketers. It lets you monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement and sales, buzz, sentiment, etc. of posts from one easy-to-use platform.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to monitor how brands or businesses are mentioned across different social properties.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics on 35+ social sites and delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on those social media sites.
More information: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention provides media monitoring for all types of businesses, marketers, agencies, CEOs, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media in real time.
Mention uses algorithms that take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have the ability to detect this, and access to intelligent, actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention provides apps for both desktop and mobile devices.
Visit this site for more information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just a web analytics tool that tracks and reports web traffic, web page view duration, visitor behaviour, what links get clicked on the most on your website or blog, etc., it can also help you monitor posts made from your WP blog to your social sites.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to read a tutorial on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add follow, share, and like social plugins and commenting features to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your campaigns are performing on Facebook’s platform.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Insights provides multiple metrics and analytics that can help you analyze metrics like post reach, page likes, engagement, etc.. You can then use this information to improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about your the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.
For more information, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a monthly breakdown of your tweet impressions, top tweets, profile views, 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 better plan your Twitter strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
Go here for more information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets video publishers see how their channel is performing on YouTube.
You can track views, traffic sources, demographics, how many minutes users watched a video, estimated revenue from video playbacks, etc.
For more information, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. You can use the information to improve the way you pin.
Go here for more information: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Tools & Services
Many new tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related tools. 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. Create personal and professional task lists and share these lists with friends, colleagues and family.
SDL/Alterian
SDL Web (formerly Alterian) is an all-in-one global web experience management solution that allows you to create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform facilitates users being able to ask questions, view Q&A content, and get their questions answered.
Appinions
Appinions, makers of an influence analytics marketing platform built on patented natural language processing and social network analysis technology has been acquired by ScribbleLive, 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. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is 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. Customers can monitor conversations, schedule and publish updates, access metrics and KPI, 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 engage with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects brands looking for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive media attention they are looking for.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch allows you to listen to conversations about your brand, your products or your market with pinpoint accuracy.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google Plus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles in which you are included. If your profile isn’t already being tracked 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 is a community management tool for building relationships and discovering leads on Twitter.
Contax.io
Contax.io allows you to track your friends and followers on Twitter and other social networks.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help brands improve 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 lets you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your customer service, marketing, and sales organizations..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog discussions. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. 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 videos or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online via social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Icerocket is a social search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, clients, or products using a blogger outreach tool that lets you sort, search, and filter 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, topics, content, 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 friends, fans, and followers 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 stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you collect and manage content from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest analytics, management, and marketing tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure 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, create pin alerts, track your Pinterest performance, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for searches, hashtags, and specific keywords. TweetReach gives you the estimated potential of the tweets for your given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media tracking tool that allows users to track #hashtags, keywords, and URLs on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic results are presented to users in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, 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 online merchants, bloggers, and consumers by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. Approved users 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 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
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 makes it easy to discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.
RetweetRank
Find out how influential are you on Twitter.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics lets you see important key performance indicators such as the visibility of a page in social media.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides easy social media analytics for your data in one place.
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 of your Twitter and Facebook 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 intelligence tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global agencies and brands. Users can cut through social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure digital 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 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. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into the audiences and communities that matter most 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 different 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 lets you easily support your sales enablement, social selling, and employee advocacy efforts by providing relevant content to your employees. With the click of a button, teams can share content with their prospects, social networks, 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 lists.
Followadder
Followadder provides 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, automate photo likes and direct messaging, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search hundreds of relevant business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other social service you use. You can quickly find out which of your tweets, posts, photos, or videos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results of what your friends are sharing online on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic of your choice.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.
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 using the WordPress platform to grow your business online, please see other tutorials and articles we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)