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 examine a number of monitoring tools that let you:
- Search, find, segment, filter and organize users according to demographic criteria, their interests and behavior, etc.
- Monitor and listen to social conversations online
- Identify key buying signals.
This information will allow you to start meaningful conversations with potential consumers and pitch them your message.
Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools you can use for monitoring social media activity. If you’ve been searching for ways to increase sales with social media, then here are 25+ free or cost-effective social media monitoring tools & resources for WordPress users.
Top Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress Users
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, or your competition on social media)
Is there a free, easy and simple way to find out what is happening in your industry or niche that will save you a massive amount of time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …
Google Alerts
(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)
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 is being written about you and your business online. Google Alerts is also free.
Google Alerts is not only only a useful social media monitoring tool for managing your reputation online, but also for sourcing information about people, brands, companies, and any topic you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing bots crawl a new web site, blog post, press release, news update, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.
To learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: How To Set Up A Google Alert In Three Simple Steps
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite.com)
Hootsuite is a social management application that lets you manage all of your social activities from an easy to use dashboard.
Hootsuite provides social media management, social selling, social marketing, and social customer service solutions. You 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, 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 provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
More info: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and it will be posted 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 using a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Visit this website to learn more: Buffer
Social Metrics
(SocialMetrics WordPress Social Media Analytics Plugin)
Social Metrics is a plugin for WordPress that tracks Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.
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 SEO improvement system.
We have written a comprehensive article on SocialMetrics. Learn more about this useful plugin go here: Social Metrics Pro
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster – Social media management for internet marketers)
Posting to WordPress, Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter can be very time-consuming. To get all these tasks done usually requires using different tools, plugins, and web applications. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single dashboard.
Sociocaster is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and internet marketers. It includes lots of powerful marketing and social features: built-in image-sharing designs, top viral video finder and posting tool, coupon marketing tool, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and more.
For more details, go here: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial.com)
SproutSocial is a premium social media management tool aimed at small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in social CRM, 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.
For more details, go here: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is an all-in-one social media management and reporting tool 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, 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 data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others.
To learn more, go here: SocialReport
Followerwonk
(Followerwonk)
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that 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.
Go here for more information: 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 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 influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, clean up and manage who you follow, and more.
More information: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform designed for small and medium sized businesses, analysts, online marketers, content marketers, and community managers. It allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement and sales, sentiment, social buzz, and more for those posts.
For more information, go here: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social measuring tool that allows you to monitor how your brand is mentioned across various social platforms.
How Sociable displays brand viability metrics. It gives you a “social magnitude” score. This social numerical view lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
To learn more, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention.com)
Mention allows 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 keyword online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.
More info: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not just an analytics software application used to track visitor behavior, page views, web traffic, bounce rates, etc., it can also help you monitor your social media campaign links.
Hootsuite has published a tutorial on tracking social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook)
Facebook not only lets you add social media buttons to your WordPress site, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your campaigns are performing on Facebook.
(Facebook Insights)
Facebook Page Insights can be accessed by all the page administrators and can help you improve your marketing efforts by allowing you to better understand how people are engaging with your Page.
You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most shares, comments, and likes and to learn about the demographics of your audience. You can then use this data to publish targeted content to Facebook users.
More information: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a monthly breakdown of your followers, tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, 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.com – Tweet activity)
Go here for more details: 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 overview, real-time, engagement, watch-time, and revenue reports.
Go here for more details: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest)
Pinterest Analytics helps you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. With Pin insights, you can get data about your audience so you can learn what your customers want.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Additional Social Media Services & 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.
The list below contains a number of other social media worth knowing about. Keep in mind that web technologies change. If any of the tools below change, please contact us.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. Create professional and personal to-do lists and share your lists with family, colleagues 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 receive quality answers.
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. Appinions’ deep data science patent protected technology allows 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 content marketers’ 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 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 access metrics and KPI, publish and schedule updates, monitor conversations, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your webcam or mobile device, share to your favorite social network or blog and engage with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash links brands searching for ways to promote their products and services with bloggers who are willing to write content designed to bring brands positive media attention.
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 whose goal is to inspire direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCount is a GooglePlus education resource. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus 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 is a community management tool for building relationships and discovering leads on Twitter.
Contax.io
Contax.io monitors your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail to help 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 the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on channels such as Facebook, Twitter, 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 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 pretty much any 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 viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links 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 creative social media tool. If you work with audio, images, or videos, 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 using social collaboration.
Meltwater Icerocket
Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which lets you search Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, or all of these for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your products, clients, or company using a blogger outreach software 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 content, topics, 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 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 change 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 KnowAboutIt 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 management, marketing, and analytics tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results across Pinterest.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot helps you gain Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a free 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 pins and boards, connect with influencers, and more.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, hashtags, search queries, and keywords are doing on Twitter. TweetReach gives you the estimated potential of the tweets for your given query.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media tracking service that lets you track keywords, URLs, and #hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Analytics are presented in an easy to understand visual reports.
Riffle
Riffle integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms (Hootsuite, Attensity, Twilert, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, 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 bloggers, online merchants, 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 provides a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution gives you all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends in the 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 being acquired, 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 makes it easy to discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.
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 the audiences, conversations, and competitors that matter to you across all social channels.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive 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 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 intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global agencies and brands. Users can cut through social noise, find conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage 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 that allow you to create better services and products for your customers. Type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying on any topic both in real-time and historically across all social networks. Find new and related topics, discover influencers, and gain valuable insights into the audiences and communities that matter most to you.
ThisMoment
ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.
Trackur
Trackur provides simple, affordable, and fast social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Google+, Twitter, Facebook and many more.
TrapIt
Trapit is lets you easily support your sales enablement, social selling, and employee advocacy efforts by providing relevant content to your employees. With one 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 a list.
Followadder
Followadder provides you with automated social networking management tools. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, follow/unfollow Instagram users, schedule posts, like back photos, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
You can think of Twellow as being like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search hundreds of relevant business categories, or your geographical area for followers on Twitter.
TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts and any other service you use. Know which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.
TwitterFall
Twitterfall lets users on Twitter view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam displays search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.
Addict-o-matic
Addictomatic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any chosen topic.
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 displays your best performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform.
Twazzup
Twazzup provides real-time Twitter analytics and monitoring.
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 the WP platform to grow your business online, please see other posts we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org