In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools that allow you to:
- Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, their interests, etc.
- Monitor and listen to online social conversations
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
This information will allow you to engage in meaningful conversations with a targeted audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you’ve been searching for better ways to improve your business results using social media, then here are 29 great social management tools & resources for internet marketers.
WordPress And Social Media Tracking
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a simple and easy way to access information about what is going on in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
Google Alerts is one of the easiest and most useful online tools available for keeping up-to-date with news about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and tracking what other people are posting about you and your business online. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically receiving information about people, companies, or any other topic you are following.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots (Googlebot) index a new web site, news update, press release, blog post, a video, tweet, or any other content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
We’ve created a simple tutorial on how to create a Google alert here: How To Set Up Google Alerts - 3 Simple Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social media activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service. Users 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 teams.
Hootsuite is one of the most used 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. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will then 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 web browser extension and as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Go here to learn more: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics)
Social Metrics Pro is a WordPress plugin that monitors social signals from many leading social networks like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetricsPro 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 on SocialMetricsPro. To learn more about this useful plugin go here: Social Metrics Pro WordPress Social Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Posting to your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and WordPress accounts is time-consuming and to get all these tasks done you usually need to use different web applications, plugins, and software. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one dashboard with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster includes lots of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, the ability to spy on your competition, built-in bookmarklet, unlimited social account management (agency license), and more.
For more details, go here: 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 (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
For more information, go here: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management solution 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 your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your 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, 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.
More information: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides you with 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 using a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, search twitter bios to easily find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.
More info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring tool designed for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, community managers, online marketers, and content marketers. It lets you monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement and sales, buzz, sentiment, etc. for those posts from one platform.
To learn more, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring service that lets you see brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics on more than 35 social channels and gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
For more details, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for businesses, agencies, CEOs, marketers, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on websites, news, blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook in real time.
Mention uses algorithms that monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows collaborative monitoring (e.g. sharing alerts with your team members), and is cross-device compatible.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just a web analytics application for monitoring website traffic, page view duration, visitor behaviour, where your visitors are coming from or exiting your site from, etc., it can also monitor your social media campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a six-step guide on tracking social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you integrate share, like, and follow social plugins and commenting features with your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your content is performing on the Facebook social platform.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights can help you track when your target audience is on Facebook. This helps improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most comments, shares, and likes and to learn about your user demographics. You can then use this data to publish content when your content is most likely to reach your target audience.
For more information, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a break down of your tweet impressions, followers, profile visits, top tweets, 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 strategy for marketing Twitter.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
For more information, go here: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube.com)
YouTube Analytics lets you see how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can measure sources of traffic, views, audience demographics, video viewing time, estimated earnings from playbacks, and more.
Go here for more info: 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. With Pin insights, you can get data about your audiences and learn what they want more of.
For more details, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Web Applications
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-related worth knowing about. Keep in mind that web technologies change. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional task lists and share your 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
Answerbase lets you create your own social Q&A community. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse Q&A content, and receive quality answers.
Appinions
Appinions, makers of an influence analytics marketing platform built on patented natural language processing and social network analysis technology is now part of ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content. 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. 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 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. Customers can publish and schedule updates, access metrics and KPI, track conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and interact with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the kinds of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that allows you to collect, analyze and report on your social media data.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google Plus. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles in which you are included. 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 lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on influencers and customers, manage multiple profiles and schedule posts, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contaxio lets you track your followers and friends on Twitter and other social networks and manage relevant, real-time relationship data.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing 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 is a social tool that aims to help improve conversations online. Millions of websites covering pretty much any 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 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 and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. If you work with sounds, videos, or images, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which lets you search Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your products, company, or clients using a blogger outreach tool 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 makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on topics, content, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a 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 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 collected from the Know About It 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 marketing, management, and analytics tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot helps you grow Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a bookmarklet, create pin alerts, find which are your top performing boards and pins, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, hashtags, search queries, and keywords are performing on Twitter. TweetReach gives you the estimated potential of the tweets for your given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring tool that lets you track keywords, URLs, and hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Users can view their performance metrics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with 16 Twitter platforms (Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Salesforce Desk, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, interest, and real-time tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links 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 is a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution provides all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends 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 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 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 delivers enterprise SEO and content marketing analysis, recommendations, forecasting and reporting for companies that want potential customers to find them faster.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides easy social media analytics for your data in a single place.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive 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 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 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 that allow you to create better products and services for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both in real-time and historically on any topic across all social channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into the audiences that matter most 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 affordable, fast, and simple social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and many more.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, your teams can share content with their social networks, customers, and prospects.
Tweepi
Tweepi provides multiple ways of searching for users that might be interested in your brand. After finding your targeted group of users, you can then easily interact with users by ‘following’, ‘adding to list’ or ‘@mentioning’ them. Twitter notifies those users via mobile and email notifications, and interested users may check your profile and follow back.
Followadder
Followadder provides users with automated social networking 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, 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 many business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other social service you use. Know which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and allows users on Twitter to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results based on what your friends share on top of your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addict-o-matic lets you 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
My Top Tweet shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a 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 our related posts section below.
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