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 monitoring tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on social conversations online
- Identify consumer buying signals.
This information will allow you to engage in meaningful conversations with a targeted audience 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 activity. If you are searching for better ways to improve your business results with social media, then here are dozens of great social media monitoring tools for business owners and WordPress users.
WordPress And Social Media – Useful Resources For Monitoring Social Indicators
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, or your competitors on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free and simple way to access information about what is happening in your niche or industry that would save you time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most useful online tools available for keeping up-to-date with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and monitoring what is being published online about you and your business. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only only a great tool for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically gathering the latest news about people, brands, companies, and any topic you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, press release, blog post, news update, a video, tweet, or any other content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to set up alerts with Google here: Setting Up Google Alerts – A Simple Step-By-Step Guide
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social profiles from an easy to use dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. You 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 add employees and clients to teams without sharing passwords.
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.
For more information, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will then automatically post it for you at spaced out intervals over the day.
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 a web interface, Buffer is also available as a web browser extension and as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
For more details, go here: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(Social Metrics WordPress Social Plugin)
Social Metrics Pro is a WordPress plugin that monitors social signals across many leading social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest.
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. For more details, go here: SocialMetricsPro Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and WordPress accounts can be time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done usually requires using different software, plugins, and web applications. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one dashboard.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, popular Twitter topics discovery tool, built-in bookmarklet, unlimited social account management (agency license), and much more.
For more information, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a robust tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
To learn more, go here: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
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 quickly and easily organize data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
To learn more, 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 to connect with influencers, breakdown your followers by social authority, tweet count, follower count, 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
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides a set of easy to use tools that empowers 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, 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.
To learn more, visit this site: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social media monitoring platform designed for small and medium sized businesses, content marketers, analysts, online marketers, and community managers. Beevolve allows you to monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales, conversion, and engagement ROI, social buzz, sentiment, etc. of all your posts.
Visit this website to learn more: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple tool that lets you see brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics and gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across those social media sites.
Go here for more information: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention allows anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your business online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows for collaborative monitoring.
Go here to learn more: 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 campaign links.
Hootsuite has published a six-step tutorial that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics here.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add social media plugins to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights lets you analyze how your site is performing on Facebook’s social platform.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights can help you track when users are on Facebook. This can help improve your business marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most shares, comments, and likes and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this data to publish more of the type of content that your audience is hungry for.
For more details, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a monthly breakdown of your tweet impressions, profile visits, 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 Analytics – Tweet activity)
To learn more, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to video publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, real-time, engagement, watch-time, and revenue reports.
More info: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. With Pin insights, you can get data about your audience so you can learn what they want more of.
More information: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Services & Tools
Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses make sense of social media.
The list below contains a number of other social media tools and services. Keep in mind that new web technologies are continually evolving. If anything changes in the list below, please contact us.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal lists and share these 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
Create social Q&A communities. 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 that lets you plan, create and distribute content. Marketers can optimize their 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. 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 more easily discoverable?”, 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, publish and schedule updates, track conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and interact with viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the types of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.
BrandWatch
accurately tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your products or your market.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is 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 GooglePlus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus 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 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
Contaxio tracks your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail to help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will never miss another comment related to your brand. Conversocial lets you manage customer service flow and discussions on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
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. Millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable use Disqus.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with full featured, clean social apps for Twitter and Facebook. Echofon apps notify you of mentions and messages. 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 videos or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online with social collaboration.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social search engine which lets you search Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software 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 content, topics, location, 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 your social influence using a “Klout Score”. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your audience hasn’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares affect 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 KnowAboutIt 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 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, Instagram, and Facebook content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest analytics, marketing, and management tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot helps you gain more Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, 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, track your Pinterest performance, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, keywords, search queries, and hashtags are doing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your 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. Users can view their performance metrics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with Twitter analytics, 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 provides a complete social data platform for conducting social business One web-based solution gives you all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments 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 being acquired, 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 provides powerful tools designed to help you grow and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.
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, the audiences, and competitors that matter to you across all social channels.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media stats that tell you 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 long-term brand performance.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social media 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 online reputation, manage their 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 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 historically and in real-time across all social channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment helps businesses engaging 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 fast, simple, and affordable social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ 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 the click of a button, your teams can share content with their social networks, prospects, and customers.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides different ways to search for users that might have an interest in your brand. After finding your targeted group of users, you can easily interact with users by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter then notifies those users via email and mobile notifications, and if they are interested, they can check your profile and follow you back.
Followadder
Followadder provides 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, 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 for Twitter followers in hundreds of relevant 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 Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other social service you use. Find out which of your posts, tweets, photos, or videos get the most engagement in seconds.
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 above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet displays your top 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 Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
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We hope you have found this information useful. To learn more about using WordPress to grow your business online, please see other articles and tutorials 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)