In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographics, psychographics, etc.
- Monitor and listen in on social conversations online
- Identify key buying signals.
With this information, you can start meaningful conversations with your audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies you can use to monitor social media activity. If you are searching for cost-effective ways to improve your business results using social media, then here are 30 great social management tools & resources
for businesses and WordPress users.
WordPress Social Media Monitoring – Useful Resources
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, and your competitors on social media)
Is there a free and simple way to know what is going on in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
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 track 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 the latest news about people, companies, and any other subject you are following.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing robots (Googlebot) crawl a new web site, blog post, press release, news update, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on setting up alerts with Google here: How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, create and customize analytics reports, share the workload 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 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.
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 is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
Go here to learn more: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(SocialMetrics Social Media Analytics Plugin For WordPress)
SocialMetrics is a WordPress plugin that lets you track social activity from many leading social networks like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, 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 autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
Go here for a detailed article on SocialMetrics: Social Metrics Pro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for online marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketer or business. You can easily manage your social media networks, engage your audiences, schedule messages, and measure ROI from one easy-to-use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes lots of powerful marketing and social features: pre-made image-sharing templates, Facebook fanpage search tool, built-in bookmarklet, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and 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 Customer Relationship Management system, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: 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.
It tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, website performance and blogs, and returns 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.
For more information, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, compare Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends, and explore and grow your social graph..
Go here for more details: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
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, 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, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.
For more information, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social monitoring tool for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, community managers, content marketers, and online marketers. It lets you monitor your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, sentiment, social buzz, etc. of posts.
More info: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring service that lets you see brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics on 35+ social channels and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on those social sites, and which sites you can improve your marketing on.
Go here for more details: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention provides social media monitoring for 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’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
More information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that software applications like Google Analytics can also help you monitor social campaigns.
Visit the Hootsuite blog for a great 6-step tutorial on tracking your social media links with Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add follow, like, and share social media buttons and commenting features to your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
Facebook Insights can be accessed by all the page administrators and can help you with your business marketing efforts by allowing you to track active users on your Page.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most shares, comments, and likes and to learn about your about your audience. You can then use this data to create more of the type of content that your audience finds relevant.
Go here for more information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a break down of your profile views, tweet impressions, top tweets, followers, and top tweets linking back 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 – Tweet activity)
More information: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets you better understand how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the overview, real time, revenue, engagement, and watch-time reports.
For more details, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics lets you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin new content. You can get information that helps you learn what your customers want.
Go here for more info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Applications
Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.
Here are some other social media-related worth knowing about. Keep in mind that web technologies change. If any of the tools below change, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal task lists and share your lists with family, colleagues and friends.
SDL/Alterian
SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse 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 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 questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content more easily discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat runs a powerful data analytics platform 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 schedule and publish updates, track conversations, access metrics and KPI, 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 content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the kinds of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.
BrandWatch
Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that lets you collect, analyze and report on your social media data.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCountCircleCount is a GooglePlus education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles that include your profile. 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 lets you track your followers and friends on Twitter and other social networks and manage relevant, real-time relationship data.
Conversocial
With Conversocial you will never miss another comment about 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 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 is a free service that connects people online through blog discussions. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.
Echofon
Echofon provides users with social apps for Facebook and Twitter. 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 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 photos or videos.
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 via social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, products, or clients using a blogger outreach tool 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’s blog search makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on location, content, 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 via 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 lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are gathered from the Know About It 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 Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest users. It lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a Pinterest-based social media marketing tool for small and medium-sized businesses. ViralWoot lets you view the performance of your pins with the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure the reach of your tweets for search queries, hashtags, and keywords. 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. Analytic metrics are displayed to users using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform (SocialEngage, Spredfast, Twilert, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, and activity 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. 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 instantly route insights back to the enterprise.
Unified Social / PageLevel
Unified Social acquired PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, 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 makes it easy to discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.
RetweetRank
Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics lets you see important key performance indicators such as the visibility of a page in social media.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured lets you analyze and understand conversations, competitors, and audiences that matter to you across every social channel.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media stats that tell you how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. 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 intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global agencies and brands. Users can cut through social noise, find 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 products and services 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 networks. 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 find, mix and share a variety of content through many 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 one click of a button, teams can share content with their prospects, customers, and social networks.
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, automate photo likes and direct messaging, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search hundreds of business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other 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 lets Twitter users access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that 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.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that shows your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter monitoring and analytics.
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 the benefits of using WordPress to grow your business online, please see other posts 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)