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The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your services, brand, and company.

Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news around your products or services.

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, identify opportunities for engagement, spy on your competitors, and help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.

As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include online reputation management (ORM) agencies, market research, marketing professionals, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed many affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track what is being said online about your brand so you can react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely fashion.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out.

WordPress And Social Media

WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and very easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.

To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social marketing opportunities.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.

Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Networks With WordPress

WordPress includes built-in social features, like 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 article titles and descriptions for social networks.

The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• Extended Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• Extensible User Groups
• Friendship Connections
• Online 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.

WP Symposium Pro

(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)

WP Symposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messages
• Notification Bar
• User 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 posts and pages using shortcodes.

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels

With most social media platforms, syndicating your 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 time and money.

If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that encourage users to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication across various social networks with WordPress.

Market Research

Social media marketing tools allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay one step ahead of your competition.

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.

Also, there are many apps that let you survey customers online. Many of these tools will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Business Brand And Online Reputation And Showcase Your Talent

Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.

You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community gets hold of the news.

Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, it can also be extremely time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress-driven site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.

(An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you automatically distribute your web content on various social media networks.)

Study Niche Authorities

Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you discover and even reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, and thought leaders in your niche.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

Recruitment companies research 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 potentially lucrative new ventures.

“Going Viral” Online Faster

Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands and corporations have failed.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, engaging, informative or “spot-on”, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also explore many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:

Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)

Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management
• Monitoring Online Trends

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard about online reputation management. 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 is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.

If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business/brand name and spot a negative comment or review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.

Monitoring conversations and interactions on social media extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of average individuals is also very important. For example, consider these scenarios:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 enough good, positive things published online either to help your case.

Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.

How good is your reputation online?

We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, yesterday’s must-have new thing suddenly stops trending and gets replaced with the new “new” thing, services get discontinued, people retire, and so on.

All of this provides you with an endless source of new content (have you noticed how all news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical content with your 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 a “go to” destination or resource for your niche or industry. People may 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 information that other online users will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In part two we explore WordPress and social media measurement. To read more, click on this link: WordPress Resources: Media Measurement – Part 2

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