In Part One 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 look at a number of monitoring tools, services and applications that let you:
- Search, find, sort, organize and target users according to specific demographics, psychographics, etc.
- Listen to social conversations online
- Identify key buying signals.
This information will let you start meaningful conversations with your audience and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use to monitor social media content. If you are searching for cost-effective ways to increase sales with social media, then check out this list of the top social monitoring tools for tracking social marketing performance.
WordPress Resources For Media Monitoring
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, or your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a free and simple way to find out what is going on in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge 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 news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and tracking what other people post about you and your business online.
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 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 bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web page, news update, blog post, press release, a tweet, video, or any other indexable 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 set up Google alerts here: A Quick And Easy Tutorial On Setting Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social profiles from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, create and customize analytics reports, share the workload 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 most used social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks (including their app directory), and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
To learn more, visit this website: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and Buffer will post the content for you.
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.
To learn more, visit this site: Buffer
Social Metrics
(Social Metrics Pro)
SocialMetricsPro is a WordPress plugin that tracks social activity from many leading social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, Pinterest, Digg, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon.
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 auto-update functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a detailed article on Social Metrics Pro. To learn more, go here: Social Metrics Pro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to your Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and WordPress accounts can be time-consuming. To get all these tasks done you usually need to use different applications, or software, plugins. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single location with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful social and marketing features: image-sharing design templates, top viral video search tool, responsive mobile user interface, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and much more.
For more details, visit this site: 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 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 for more info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management and reporting solution that allows you to track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.
Social Report 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 your data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
More info: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter on any profile data: bio, location, name, who they follow, etc., breakdown your followers by social authority, tweet count, follower count, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
For more information, go here: 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 followers and following lists using 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 the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, clean up and manage who you follow, and more.
For more details, visit this site: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform for SMBs, online marketers, analysts, content marketers, and community managers. It allows you to track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales, engagement, and conversion ROI, buzz, social sentiment, and more for those posts.
Go here for more details: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social media monitoring service that lets you see brand mentions across different social platforms.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics and gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and which areas you can improve your marketing on.
Visit this website to learn more: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention can help businesses monitor the web.
Mention uses algorithms that 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 can also be used for collaborative monitoring.
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 posts made to your social media campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a simple six-step tutorial on tracking your social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook not only lets you add social buttons to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your site is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights can be seen by any admins of your page and can help you with your marketing efforts by allowing you to better understand metrics about how people are engaging with your Page.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts have attracted the most shares, comments, and likes and to learn about your about your audience. You can then use this information to create more of the types of posts that your audience is hungry for.
More info: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a monthly break down of your tweet impressions, profile views, followers, top tweets, and top tweets linking back to you.
The Twitter Analytics dashboard also provides you with useful information about your tweets in the form of Tweet highlights, allowing you to plan your Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
More info: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to video publishers.
You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the real time, overview, revenue, watch-time, and engagement reports.
Go here to learn more: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics lets you see what people like from your profile, what they save from your website, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin content to your boards. You can get data about your audience and learn what they want more of.
For more details, go here: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Services And Tools
New tools and technologies are being developed each year to help businesses make sense of social media.
Here are some other social media tools and services. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please let us know.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal lists and share these lists with colleagues, family and friends.
SDL/Alterian
SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that allows you to create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.
Answerbase
Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. 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 was acquired by ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. Appinions’ technology enables customers to optimize all stages of the content marketing lifecycle. Appinions enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to questions like “what should we write about?”, ”what keywords do we use to make our content more easily discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat (formerly ArgyleSocial – a social media marketing platform for marketers) 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 access metrics and KPI, publish and schedule updates, track conversations, 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 viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the kinds of opportunities they would like to be contacted about.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch is a social media monitoring platform that helps marketers capture, analyze and share insights from social data to better evaluate the value of marketing in the socialsphere.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCount is a Google Plus education resource. 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 your GooglePlus 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 friends and followers on Twitter and other social networks and manage relevant, real-time relationship data.
Conversocial
Never miss another comment about your brand. Conversocial lets you manage the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your sales organizations, marketing, and customer service..
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog discussions. Millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable use Disqus.
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. If you work with videos, audio, or images, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online via social collaboration.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, 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 search, sort, 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 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 affect your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
KnowAboutIt 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 capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring tool designed specifically for Pinterest. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot helps you gain Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a bookmarklet, create pin alerts, track your Pinterest performance, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for hashtags, searches, and chosen keywords. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports.
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 results using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Mention, Spredfast, Twilert, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and real-time social monitoring tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links consumers, bloggers, and online merchants 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 social 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 being acquired, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated in the Unified Social 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
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 lets you analyze and understand conversations, the audiences, and competitors that matter to you across every social channel.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media analytics that let you see how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. You can create, manage, and optimize all of your Facebook and Twitter 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 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, find the conversations that matter, measure their digital reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.
Sysomos
Sysomos monitors billions of conversations and helps 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 historically and in real-time across all social channels. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and get insights into 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 different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides affordable, simple, and fast social media monitoring.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With one click of a button, your teams can share content with their social networks, customers, and prospects.
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 Instagram management tools. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, schedule posts, follow/unfollow Instagram users, like back photos, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search for followers on Twitter in dozens of relevant business categories or search your geographical area.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet 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. Discover which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows Twitter users to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam gives you search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure exactly how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet shows your top performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search 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 that 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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