The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s connected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your company, brand, and products.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you direct access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, spot potential opportunities for engagement, spy on your competition, and help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, products, businesses, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by a cross-section of people including market research, marketing teams, online reputation management (ORM) agencies, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately different service providers have made available tools that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track consumer behavior around their brands or products allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Social Media 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro 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 Messaging
- Notification Bar
- Member 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.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of great plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content across various social networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Using social measuring tools and applications allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and 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 your social networking sites.
Also, there are applications that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website 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-driven blog can automate content syndication across various social media channels.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to observe and discover what the experts are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Online Viral Sensation?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.
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, compelling, entertaining or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could 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. In this free course we also explore ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing it more and more as time goes on, because it is becoming increasingly more important for many individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. 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 brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative impact 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 discover 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 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 businesses all over the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what people are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective user review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Reviews Management For WordPress
Analyzing Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 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 information that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part two we explore social media monitoring tools for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: Media Tools Every Business Owner Should Know About – Part 2
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org