Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your products, company, or brand on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, identify opportunities for engagement, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including marketing teams, PR agencies, market research, social engagement and community personnel, professional sales reps, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify what is being said online about your products or brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes built-in social features, like interactive commenting and discussions. A range of WordPress plugins can add additional social features to your site that let you reach a wider audience on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is known as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin has a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across social networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tools and applications to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and opportunities and stay ahead of competitors.
Once you have identified new content opportunities, you can post messages individually on each of the social networks you’d like to reach, or publish these on a WordPress site that’s been configured to automatically notify those social networks.
Additionally, there are applications that let you run surveys online. Many apps and tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations to gain valuable insights.
Remember, we are born with two ears and one mouth as a reminder that we are meant to do twice as much listening as talking. What you post and how you respond online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress website to automate your content syndication on social networks.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what the experts are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies research social media profiles of individuals when looking for potential candidates to fill specific positions. As a business owner, you can do the same, and look for staff, network with other business owners, and connect with like-minded marketers and potential JV partners. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, engaging, informative or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing about it more and more as time goes on, because it is becoming increasingly more important for high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, however, you first have to find out about it. The sooner you can spot a negative comment, bad review, or misinformed opinion, the sooner you can begin to do something about it.
That’s where social media monitoring tools can help you. If you Google your name or your business/brand and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring conversations and interactions on social media extends beyond large brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute feels hard done by.
- A former employee feels disgruntled after being fired.
- A potential employer searches online for information about you. They may not find anything bad, but there may not be a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you have a system in place for managing your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Tracking Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, yesterday’s next big thing suddenly stops trending and gets replaced with the new “new” thing, services get discontinued, people retire, and so on.
All of this can provide you with an endless source of new content (have you noticed how all news media channels now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical content with additional useful comments or insightful opinions to your site not only can help drive more traffic to your business, but your blog or website could end up becoming an authoritative destination or resource for your niche or industry. People could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part two we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement tools. To continue reading this article, click here: Media Resources For WordPress Users – Part Two
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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