The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your business or products is not enough. To succeed in today’s interconnected global and digital world, you need to build and nurture an engaged community around your company, brand, and products, based around actively “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, spy on the competition, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.
As a tool for business intelligence, social signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of people including marketing teams, market research, digital reputation management companies, social marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately many service providers have created a range of affordable and even free tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to track what consumers are saying about your brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Media Monitoring Tools
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using the WP CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article, you will be able to explore 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 for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers 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, 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 networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is often referred to as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides 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
- 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that allow users to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content on various social media networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Use social measuring tools and applications to discover what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay one step 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.
Also, there are tools that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Credibility And Brand Online
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, 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 have been given 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 to users online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute content across social channels using an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to discover and and maybe even be inspired by what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays researching social media and studying the 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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands 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, compelling, 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content. 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(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)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard about online reputation management. 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 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 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative effects with an excess of positive material, 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 and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Businesses are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of individuals is also very important. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute is feeling 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, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Online reputation management should not be ignored if you want your business to grow in the web economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. More information: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Reviews Management For WordPress
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what 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 research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 and new content ideas (have you noticed how all news media broadcasters 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site 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 One
In the next section we explore social media tools that can help grow your business online. To continue reading, click on this link: WordPress And Media Tracking – Part Two
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