In Part 1 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 look at a number of tracking tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to demographic criteria, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Monitor social conversations online
- Identify key buying signals.
This information lets you start meaningful conversations with a targeted audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use to monitor social media content. If you’ve been looking for smarter ways to improve your business results with social media, then here are more than 27 social media analytics tools
for WordPress users.
WordPress Resources - Media Monitoring
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, or your competition on social media)
Is there a simple and easy (and free) way to access information about what is going on in your industry or niche that can save you a massive amount of time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most useful online tools available for keeping up with news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what other people are publishing online about you and your business. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for sourcing the latest news about people, brands, companies, and any topic you are following.
With Google Alerts, you 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 content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
To learn how to set up Google alerts, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: Setting Up A Google Alert – A Step-By-Step Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social media activities from an intuitive dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, 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 add employees and clients to teams without sharing passwords.
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.
Go here for more details: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted 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 using a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a web browser extension.
Go here for more information: Buffer
Social Metrics Pro
(SocialMetricsPro)
Social Metrics is a plugin that lets you track Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
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, 1-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a detailed article on Social Metrics Pro. Go here to learn more about this useful plugin: Social Metrics
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for online marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works in any business marketing campaign. You can easily engage with audiences, manage your social networks, schedule post messages, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes powerful marketing and social features: built-in image-sharing templates, popular Twitter topics discovery tool, bulk content importing & scheduling, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and much more.
To learn more, visit this site: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a robust social media management 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, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here to learn more: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that lets you 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 organize data by customers or business, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, compare followers of other users to find overlaps and new audiences, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
More info: 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, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, easily search inside your Twitter stream to find and follow the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out who isn’t following you back, and more.
To learn more, visit this site: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring tool for SMBs, content marketers, community managers, online marketers, and analysts. Beevolve allows you to monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement and sales, sentiment, social buzz, etc. for those posts.
To learn more, visit this website: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring service that allows you to see brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics and delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
To learn more, visit this website: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for businesses, agencies, CEOs, marketers, etc..
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows collaborative monitoring (e.g. sharing alerts with different team members), and is cross-device compatible.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful and free software tools like Google Analytics can also help track posts made to your social campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a 6-step guide on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social media buttons to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you understand how your campaigns are performing on Facebook’s social networking platform.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
The Facebook Insights dashboard can help you see display data about your audience on Facebook. This can help improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about audience demographics. You can then use this data to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.
More info: 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, profile visits, top tweets, followers, and 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 strategy.
(Twitter – Tweet activity)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics lets publishers better understand how their channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can track sources of traffic, views, demographics, how many minutes users watched a video, estimated revenue from video playbacks, and more.
For more details, visit this site: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. You can get information that helps you learn who your audience is and what your customers want.
Visit this site to learn more: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media 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 worth knowing about. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. If any of the tools below change, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal lists and share these lists with family, colleagues and friends.
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 your customers.
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. This tool provides answers to questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. 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 publish and schedule updates, track conversations, 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 interact with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands searching for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers who are willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive media attention they are looking for.
BrandWatch
accurately listen to conversations about your brand, your products or your market.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount helps users better understand how to use GooglePlus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles following your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add 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 monitors your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail that can help you choose when to follow back.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will never miss another comment about your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and social media discussions on channels like 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 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 just about every topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with full featured, clean social apps for Facebook and Twitter. 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 viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links 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 creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, privately or publicly, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software 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 topics, location, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analysis 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 users haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares change 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 KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre provides users with a real-time content marketing platform that lets you engage your audience, leverage native and social user-generated content surrounding your brand, and curate Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram content from fans into an interactive display.
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 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 boards and pins with built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, searches, and chosen keywords. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports with the estimated reach of your tweets based on various methods of measuring social performance.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring application that lets you track keywords, URLs, and hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their performance results using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with 16 Twitter platforms (Sparkcentral, SocialFlow, Lithium, etc) 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, consumers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. Approved users 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 trends or moments 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 allowing 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 delivers enterprise SEO and content marketing analysis, recommendations, forecasting and reporting for companies that want potential customers to find them faster.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand conversations, competitors, and audiences that matter to you across all social channels.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats 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 and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global brands and agencies. Users can cut through social noise, listen into the conversations that matter, measure digital 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 aimed at creating better products and services for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both historically and in real-time on any topic across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the audiences and communities that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment allows businesses to engage with everyone, everywhere. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, simple, and fast 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, customers, and social networks.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides a number of different ways of searching for users that could have an interest in your brand. After finding your targeted group of users, you can easily interact with them by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter then notifies those users via mobile and email notifications, and if they are interested, they can check your profile and follow you back.
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, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search for followers on Twitter in dozens 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 along with any other social service you use. You can quickly know which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows users on Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that gives you 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 lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search engine 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 that you have found this information useful. To learn more about using the WP content publishing platform to grow your business online, please see other posts we have published on this site.
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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)