In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of tracking tools that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to demographic criteria, their interests, etc.
- Listen in on social conversations online
- Identify buying signals.
With this information, you can start 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 technologies you can use to monitor social media activity. If you’ve been searching for cost-effective ways to increase sales using social media, then here are 30 social monitoring tools & resources for helping you gain a better understanding of your audience.
Media Resources Every Business Owner Should Know About
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your business, or your competition on social media)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple and easy way to know what is going on in your industry or niche that would save you a massive amount of time doing research? Well, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)
Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most useful tools available online 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 other people are publishing online about you and your business. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically sourcing information about people, brands, companies, or any other subject you are interested in.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots index a new web page, news update, blog post, press release, 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.
To learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this tutorial: A Quick Tutorial On How To Set Up A Google Alert
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management application 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, 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 collaborate with team members.
Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many social networks, and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
More information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will 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 a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
More info: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(Social Metrics Pro)
SocialMetricsPro is a WordPress plugin that monitors social signals from leading social networks like GooglePlus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and Digg.
Some of the powerful features included in Social Metrics 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 Social Metrics. For more info, see this article: SocialMetricsPro WordPress Social Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Sociocaster is easy to use and works for any marketing campaign. You can easily manage your social media networks, engage with audiences, schedule messages, and measure ROI from one easy to use dashboard.
Sociocaster includes lots of powerful social and marketing features: a powerful visual designer, popular Twitter topics discovery tool, built-in comments, favorites, retweets, and likes checker, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and much more.
For more details, visit this site: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium tool aimed at 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 for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More info: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management and reporting tool that lets you track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.
It tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns data from your social channels using 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.
Go here for more info: 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, 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..
For more information, go here: 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 your 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 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, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring tool for small and medium sized businesses, online marketers, analysts, community managers, and content marketers. Beevolve lets you track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, buzz, social sentiment, etc. of all posts.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable.com)
HowSociable is a simple social measuring tool that lets you see brand mentions on the social web.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and which channels can be improved.
For more information, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention is built on a simple idea of allowing anyone to know what’s being said about them online and on social media.
Mention uses algorithms that take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your business online, you have the ability to detect this, and access to intelligent, actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows you to collaborate with other team members.
More info: 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 help you monitor posts made from your website to your social media accounts.
Hootsuite has published a 6-step tutorial that shows you how to track social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add share, follow, and like social plugins and commenting features to your site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your site is performing on Facebook’s social platform.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
The Facebook Page Insights dashboard tracks active users to help you improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts have the most likes, comments, and shares and to learn about about your audience. You can then use this information to publish content when your content is most likely to reach your target audience.
Go here for more info: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter.com)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a break down of your profile views, followers, tweet impressions, tweets, and 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 strategy for Twitter.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
Go here for more details: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets you see how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can measure views, traffic sources, demographics, revenue from video playbacks, average video viewing duration, and more.
For more details, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore what Pins and boards people like most, what they save from your website, and how much traffic your site gets when you pin new content. You can use the data to improve the way you pin.
For more details, visit this site: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media Services And Web Applications
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.
The list below contains a number of other social media-related applications. Keep in mind that web technologies are continually evolving. If any of the tools below change, please contact us.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal to-do 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 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. Appinions’ technology allows customers to optimize all stages of the content marketing lifecycle. The ScribbleLive acquisition 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 content discoverable?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat (formerly ArgyleSocial – a social media marketing platform for marketers) is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat is a powerful data analytics application 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, access metrics and KPI, monitor 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 your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers choose the types 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 part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action and participation.
CircleCount
CircleCount is a Google+ education resource. 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 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
Contaxio allows you to 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 brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and discussions on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
SocialStudio
Social Studio helps you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening on social media, then use that information to make informed business decisions.
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 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 sharing media simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides real-time chat to quickly send and receive messages to any of your friends online, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post videos or photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with audio, videos, or images, 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 using social collaboration.
Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which allows you to search Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, company, or products using a blogger outreach tool that lets you sort, filter, 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 content, topics, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a social media monitoring and performance analysis tool. Klout brings influencers and brands together, rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, 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 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 stories attract.
LiveFyre
LiveFyre lets you capture conversations from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing, analytics, and management tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results across the Pinterest network.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot (formerly Pinwoot) is a Pinterest-based social media marketing platform for small and medium-sized businesses. You can add multiple accounts and view the performance of your pins with built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, search queries, hashtags, and keywords are performing on Twitter. 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 monitor their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with Twitter analytics, 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 bloggers, consumers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. Users can earn money from every purchase made.
MutualMind
MutualMind is a complete social data platform for conducting social business One web-based solution provides you with all the tools you 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 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 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 provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers powerful social media analytics that tell you how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. 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 powerful insights about your audience, and track your brand’s performance over the long term.
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 digital reputation, manage consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.
Sysomos
Sysomos monitors billions of conversations and helps you monitor, analyze, gather insights and make decisions that allow you to create better products and services 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 networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the audiences and communities that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on your business, 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, fast, and simple social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including GooglePlus, Facebook, Twitter and many more.
TrapIt
Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, teams can share content with their customers, social networks, 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 lists.
Followadder
Followadder provides automated 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, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search hundreds of 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 service you use. You can quickly learn which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall allows users on Twitter to access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam gives you search results of what your friends are sharing 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 optimize content, analyze social media engagement, and measure how you’re spending your budget.
MyTopTweet
My Top Tweet is a simple social monitoring tool that shows your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search engine and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.
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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 our related posts section below.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum