In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
In this section, we look at a number of monitoring tools that let you:
- Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographic criteria, psychographic indicators, etc.
- Monitor and listen to social conversations online
- Identify key consumer buying signals.
With this information, you can start meaningful conversations with prospects 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 are looking for ways to increase sales using social media, then here are 29 social management tools for better understanding your target audience.
25+ Media Tracking Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online
(Discover what people are saying about you, your business, or your competitors on social media)
Is there a free and simple way to access information about what is new in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge 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 simplest and most useful tools available online for keeping up 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. It’s also free.
Google Alerts is not only great for managing your reputation online, but also for automatically receiving information about people, companies, and any other topic you need to know about.
With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots (Googlebot) crawl a new web page, press release, blog post, news update, a tweet, video, or any other indexable content related to the topic you’ve subscribed to, 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 Tutorial
Hootsuite
(Hootsuite)
Hootsuite is a social management platform that lets you manage all of your social activities from one dashboard.
Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social selling, social marketing, 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 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 many social networks (including their app directory), and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.
More info: Hootsuite
Buffer
(Buffer.com)
Buffer lets you schedule your social content. You add updates to your Buffer account and it will be posted for you at spaced intervals.
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 browser extension and as a mobile app.
Go here for more details: Buffer
SocialMetrics
(Social Metrics)
Social Metrics is a plugin for WordPress that tracks social signals across many leading social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Digg, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon.
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, one-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.
We have written a detailed article about SocialMetrics here: Social Metrics WordPress Social Plugin
Sociocaster
(Sociocaster)
Posting to Linkedin, Facebook, WordPress, and Twitter is time-consuming. To get all of these tasks done you usually need to use different web apps, plugins, or tools. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one dashboard with just a few clicks.
Sociocaster includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, the ability to spy on your competition, bulk content importing and scheduling, agency license to manage unlimited social accounts, and more.
Go here for more information: Sociocaster
SproutSocial
(SproutSocial)
SproutSocial is a premium tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.
SproutSocial has a built-in Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk, team collaboration tools, security features, analytics and reports, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.
Go here for more details: SproutSocial
SocialReport
(SocialReport)
SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that lets you track and manage all of your social media 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 organize data by business or customers, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.
Visit this site to learn more: 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, discover who your most important, influential followers are, where they are located, when do they tweet, hone your social graph by following and unfollowing users, etc.
More info: Followerwonk
ManageFlitter
(ManageFlitter)
ManageFlitter provides 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, search twitter bios to easily find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, manage follows and unfollows, and more.
For more details, go here: ManageFlitter
Beevolve
(Beevolve.com)
Beevolve.com is a social monitoring platform for small and medium sized businesses, content marketers, community managers, online marketers, and analysts. Beevolve allows you to monitor your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure engagement, conversion, and sales ROI, sentiment, buzz, etc. of all your posts.
More information: Beevolve
HowSociable
(HowSociable)
HowSociable is a simple social measuring service that allows you to monitor brand mentions across different social media platforms.
HowSociable.com displays brand viability metrics. It gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media.
For more information, go here: HowSociable.com
Mention
(Mention)
Mention is a social monitoring tool for all kinds of businesses, agencies, marketers, CEOs, etc..
Mention’s algorithms monitor billions of data points, so when someone mentions your keyword online, you have access to real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention also allows for collaborative monitoring.
Go here to learn more: Mention
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics is not only an analytics application used for measuring unique page views, visitor behaviour, web traffic, which key phrases users are searching for online, etc., it can also track posts made to your social media campaigns.
Hootsuite has published a great six-step guide that shows you how to track your social media links with Google Analytics on this blog post.
Facebook Insights
(Facebook.com)
Facebook not only lets you add like, share, and follow social buttons and commenting features to your website, 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.com – Insights)
Facebook Insights tracks active users to help improve your marketing efforts.
You can use Page Insights to see which of your posts are attracting the most shares, comments, and likes 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.
To learn more, go here: Facebook Insights
Twitter Analytics
(Twitter Analytics)
Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and provides a break down of your top tweets, profile views, followers, tweet impressions, and 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 strategy.
(Twitter.com – Tweet activity)
Go here for more details: Twitter Analytics
YouTube Analytics
(YouTube Analytics)
YouTube Analytics lets you better understand how your channel is performing on the YouTube platform.
You can monitor sources of traffic, views, demographics, earnings from video playbacks, how long users watched a video, etc.
More information: YouTube Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
(Pinterest.com)
Pinterest Analytics helps you see what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. With Pin insights, you can use the data to improve the way you pin.
More info: Pinterest Analytics
Other Social Media 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 services. Keep in mind that web technologies continually evolve. If any of the tools below change, please let us know in the comment section.
Wunderlist
A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you 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 allows users to ask questions, browse Q&A content, and get their questions answered.
Appinions
Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content online. 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 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, monitor conversations, publish and schedule updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.
Bambuser
Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and engage with viewers. Share via your smart device and stream to your blog.
BlogDash
BlogDash connects and brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the types of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.
BrandWatch
accurately tap into the power of social listening about your brand, your market, or your products.
Buzzflash
Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas that features daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action.
CircleCount
CircleCount is a Google+ education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the GooglePlus circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of your Google+ 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 tracks your followers and friends 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 customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and social media discussions on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, 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 is a social tool that helps improve conversations online. Disqus is used by millions of websites covering pretty much any topic imaginable.
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 real-time chat that lets you quickly send and receive messages to any of your friends online, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post videos and photos.
Everytime
Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments can then be easily discussed, shared, and found online via social collaboration.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a social media search engine which lets you search the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, or all at once for any keywords you like.
GroupHigh
With GroupHigh you can promote your company, products, or clients using a blogger outreach software 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 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 friends, fans, and followers haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares affect your Klout Score.
KnowAboutIt
Know About It lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are gathered from the Know About It system from the previous 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 provides users with a real-time content marketing platform that lets you engage your audience, leverage native and social user-generated content surrounding your brand, and curate Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram content from fans into an interactive display.
TailWind
Tailwind is a social media monitoring application for Pinterest users. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results across the entire Pinterest network.
Viralwoot
ViralWoot is a social media marketing tool that lets small and medium-sized business schedule, promote, manage and grow their accounts on Pinterest. Multiple accounts can be added to the tool and you can view the performance of your pins using the built-in analytics reports.
TweetReach
TweetReach lets you measure the reach of your tweets for search queries, hashtags, and keywords. TweetReach gives you insights about Twitter and snapshot reports with the estimated reach of your tweets based on various methods of measuring social performance.
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 by CrowdRiff integrates with over a dozen Twitter platforms and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, 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 lets you link 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 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 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 then, 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 lets you find an audience, measure, manage and maximize your social media presence.
RetweetRank
RetweetRank lets you get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand.
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 tell you how your social performance stacks against wider industry benchmarks and the competition. 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 insights about your audience, and track your brand’s performance over the long term.
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social media intelligence 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 online 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. Simply type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both historically and in real-time on any topic across all social networks. 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 your business, 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 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, your teams can share content with their prospects, customers, and social networks.
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 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, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.
Twellow
Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search many relevant 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 Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts and any other social service you use. Know 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 in the form of tweets.
Wajam
Wajam is a tool that 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 chosen topic.
Bitly
Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.
MyTopTweet
MyTopTweet is a simple social monitoring tool that displays your top 10 performing tweets.
SocialMention
SocialMention is a real-time social search engine 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.
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We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about using the WP platform to grow your business online, please see other tutorials and articles we have published here on WPCompendium.org.
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