In Part One 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 demographic criteria, their interests, etc.
- Listen in on social conversations online
- Identify buying signals.
With this information, you can start meaningful conversations with consumers and pitch them information about your products or services.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use for monitoring social media content. If you are looking for smarter ways to improve your business results with social media, then check out our list of the top social monitoring tools and resources for improving social media marketing ROI.
WordPress Social Media Monitoring – Resources
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a simple and easy way to know what is happening in your industry or niche that can save you time doing research? Yes, there is, and it’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for new content)
Google Alerts is one of the easiest 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 posting about you and your business online. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for receiving the latest news about people, brands, companies, or any other subject you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots (Googlebot) crawl a new web page, blog post, press release, news update, a tweet, video, 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 how to create a Google alert here: Google Alerts – A Step-By-Step Guide
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social media activities from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. Users 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 collaborate with teams.
Hootsuite is one of the leading 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.
More information: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will then 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 using a web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.
For more details, go here: Buffer
SocialMetricsPro
(SocialMetrics WordPress Social Plugin)
SocialMetricsPro is a WordPress plugin that monitors social signals from leading social networks like Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Digg, 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.
If you want to learn more about SocialMetrics, refer to this article: SocialMetricsPro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for entrepreneurial marketers)
Posting to your Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress accounts can be time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done usually requires different software, plugins, or web apps. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one dashboard.
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 finder and posting tool, advanced link share customization for Facebook, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and more.
More information: 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, social monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, analytics and custom reports, 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 customers or business, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.
More information: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you search Twitter bios, compare users, analyze, track, sort and compare 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.
To learn more, visit this website: Followerwonk Twitter Analytics
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 by a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, search twitter bios to easily find and follow the right accounts for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out which inactive accounts you follow, and more.
For more details, visit this website: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve is a social monitoring tool designed for small and medium sized businesses, community managers, online marketers, analysts, and content marketers. Beevolve allows you to track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement and sales, social sentiment, buzz, and more of posts.
Go here for more details: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social monitoring service that lets you monitor how brands or businesses are mentioned across different social media platforms.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics across dozens of social media sites and 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 details, go here: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention is a social media monitoring tool for all kinds of businesses, agencies, CEOs, marketers, etc..
Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your keyword 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 different team members.
More information: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only an analytics application used for monitoring page view duration, website traffic, visitor behaviour, where your visitors are departing from, etc., it can also help you track posts made to your social sites.
Hootsuite has published a 6-step guide on tracking social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add social media plugins to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your campaigns are performing on the Facebook social networking platform.
(Facebook – Insight Types)
Facebook Page Insights can help you track active users on your page. This helps improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to see which of your posts have the most comments, shares, and likes and to learn about your about your audience. You can then use this data to publish targeted content to Facebook users.
Visit this site to learn more: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and gives you a monthly breakdown of your profile views, followers, top tweets, tweet impressions, and top 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 marketing strategy.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
To learn more, visit this site: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube)
YouTube Analytics lets you see how your channel is performing on YouTube.
You can measure sources of traffic, views, demographics, how long users watched a video, total estimated earning from playbacks, etc.
For more information, go here: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps 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 use the data to improve the way you pin.
Go here for more information: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Services And Tools
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.
Here are some other social media-related services. Keep in mind that web technologies are continually evolving. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create personal and professional lists and share these lists with family, friends and colleagues.
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 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, 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 that lets you plan, create and distribute content. Appinions’ deep data science patent protected technology allows customers to optimize every stage of the content marketing lifecycle. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. This tool provides answers to questions like “what should we write about?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
Viralheat is part of Cision, a global media intelligence software company. Viralheat is 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 that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can publish and schedule updates, follow conversations, access metrics and KPI, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
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 connects brands looking for ways to promote their products and services with bloggers who are willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive media attention they are looking for.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch is a social media monitoring platform that helps marketers capture, analyze and share insights from social data to better prove the value of marketing social.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCount helps users better understand how to use GooglePlus. 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 lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on influencers and customers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contaxio monitors your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail that helps you choose when to follow back.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and discussions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening on social media, and use that information to make better business decisions.
Disqus
Disqus is a free service that connects people online through blog comments and 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 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 creative social media tool. With Everytime, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online with social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Icerocket is a social search engine which allows you to search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your clients, products, or company 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’s blog search makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on topics, location, content, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website and mobile app that helps you analyze user’s social media influence via the “Klout Score”, which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. 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
KnowAboutIt is a simple service that monitors popular news sources for stories that are generating a lot of conversation. 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 access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application designed specifically for Pinterest. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot helps you grow Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a 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, find which are your top performing boards and pins, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, keywords, hashtags, and search queries are performing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for your 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. Analytics are displayed to users in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Twitter.com, Spredfast, Lithium, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.
Merchii
Merchii links bloggers, consumers, and online merchants 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 for conducting social business One web-based solution provides users with all the tools they need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends in the 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 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 provides powerful tools designed to grow and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive 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 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 long-term brand performance.
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 conversations that matter, measure their online reputation, manage consumer relationships and boost the ROI of their social activities.
Sysomos
Sysomos monitors billions of conversations and helps 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 channels. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the audiences and communities 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 different channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides fast, affordable, and simple social media monitoring.
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 you with automated social networking 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
You can think of Twellow as being 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 can visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other social service you use. Find out which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and lets users on Twitter view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that displays search results of what your friends are sharing online above your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page that displays 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 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social 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 that you have found this information useful. To learn more about using WordPress to grow your business online, please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now