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, organize and target users according to demographics, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Listen in on online social conversations
- Identify key consumer 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 tools you can use to monitor social media activity. If you’ve been searching for smarter ways to improve your business results with social media, then check out this list of 25+ great social analytics tools for discovering and connecting with your target customers.
WordPress And Social Media Monitoring
(Discover what consumers are saying about you, your brand, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a free, simple and easy way to find out what is new in your industry or niche that will save you a massive amount of 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 simple, useful and free tool from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and monitor what is being written online about you and your business.
Google Alerts is not only only a great tool for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for receiving the latest news about people, brands, companies, or any subject you are following.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s bots crawl a new web page, press release, blog post, news update, a video, tweet, or any other indexable 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 In 3 Simple & Easy Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service solutions. You 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 most used 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.
For more information, go here: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will then post the content 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 the web interface, Buffer is also available as a web browser extension and as a mobile app.
More information: Buffer
Social Metrics
(SocialMetrics)
Social Metrics Pro is a WordPress plugin that monitors social activity across many leading social media networks like GooglePlus, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
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 autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article about SocialMetricsPro here: Social Metrics Pro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for entrepreneurial marketers)
Posting to your WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin accounts can be time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done usually requires different plugins, software, and web applications. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one location with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster includes powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, viral video finder and posting tool, bulk content import and schedule feature, unlimited social media account management (agency license), and more.
More information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a robust social media management 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 for customer support, team collaboration tools, security features, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
More information: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport.com)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management solution 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, website performance and blogs, and displays data from your social channels on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
More information: 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, URL, compare Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, correlate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions, and explore and grow your social graph..
More information: Followerwonk
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, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, 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 who isn’t following you back, and more.
More info: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform designed for small and medium sized businesses, community managers, content marketers, online marketers, and analysts. It allows you to track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting sales and engagement, social sentiment, buzz, etc. of all your posts.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social media measuring tool that allows you to monitor how business and brands are mentioned on the social web.
HowSociable displays brand viability metrics on 30+ social media channels and delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing across those social sites, and which sites can be improved.
For more details, go here: HowSociable
Mention
(Mention)
Mention provides media monitoring for businesses, agencies, marketers, CEOs, etc..
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, 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)
Google Analytics is not just a great analytics application that reports visitor behaviour, web traffic, unique web page views and view duration, bounce rates, etc., it can also help you monitor posts made from your WordPress blog to your social media sites.
Visit the Hootsuite blog to read a tutorial on how to track your social media links with Google Analytics.
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 understand how your site is performing on Facebook.
(Facebook.com – Insights)
Facebook Page Insights helps you better understand metrics about page performance to help you with your business marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts have attracted the most shares, comments, and likes and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this information to publish more of the types of posts that your audience is hungry for.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a breakdown of your profile views, followers, tweet impressions, top tweets, and 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 better plan your Twitter marketing strategy.
(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)
To learn more, visit this site: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics provides analytics to publishers.
You can see sources of traffic, audience demographics, views, revenue from playbacks, average video viewing time, etc.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest Analytics)
Pinterest Analytics helps 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 so you can learn what your customers want.
Go here to learn more: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media-Related Tools
Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses make sense of social media.
Here are some other social media services. Keep in mind that new web technologies continually evolve. 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 task lists and share your lists with colleagues, friends and family.
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 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 is now part of ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform for planning, creating and distributing content online. Marketers can optimize their 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 content marketers’ questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.
ViralHeat
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. Customers can access metrics and KPI, track conversations, publish and schedule updates, 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 your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands looking to promote their products and services with bloggers who are willing to write content aimed at bringing brands the positive attention they are searching for.
BrandWatch
BrandWatch lets you tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your market, or your products with pinpoint accuracy.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct social 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 monitored 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 lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on customers and influencers, manage multiple profiles and schedule posts, and analyze Twitter data.
Contax.io
Contax.io monitors your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail to help you decide when to follow back.
Conversocial
Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and social media discussions on channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
SocialStudio
Social Studio lets you build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media across your sales organizations, customer service, and marketing..
Disqus
Disqus is a social tool that helps improve conversations 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 mentions and messages. 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 sounds, images, or videos, 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.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social media search engine which lets you search Twitter, the blogosphere, Facebook, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is 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, content, location, and more.
Klout
Klout is a website, mobile app, and 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 collected from the KnowAboutIt system from the past 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the Know About It system is aware of in relation to that story.
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 Pinterest, analyze industry trends and measure results and performance.
ViralWoot
Viralwoot is a social media marketing platform that lets small and medium-sized business schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts on Pinterest. You can add multiple accounts and view the performance of your pins using the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, hashtags, keywords, and search queries are doing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for any given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media search monitoring tool that lets users track URLs, keywords, and #hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Users can assess their analytics using easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle by CrowdRiff integrates with every Twitter platform and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and social monitoring 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, online merchants, and consumers by tagging images on the web. 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 you with all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments in the data and route the insights back to the enterprise instantly.
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 with Unified Social’s operating platform. These tools form a complete marketing suite allowing top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.
Refollow
Refollow lets you discover, measure and manage your social media presence.
RetweetRank
RetweetRank lets you get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand.
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, audiences, and competitors that matter to you across every social channel.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats 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 powerful 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 agencies and leading brands around the world. Users can cut through social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.
Sysomos
Sysomos provides powerful social media analytics that lets you monitor, analyze, gather insights and make decisions aimed at creating better services and products for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both historically and in real-time on any topic across all social channels. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and get insights into the audiences that matter to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on what business you run, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, fast, and affordable social media monitoring.
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 prospects, social networks, and customers.
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 social networking management software. 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, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search many business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other service you use. Find out which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall is based in the UK and lets users on Twitter access upcoming trends and patterns posted by users.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that gives you search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addictomatic
Instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
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 powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement.
***
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 tutorials and articles we have published on this site.
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com