The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your company or services is not enough. To achieve success in today’s highly connected digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a social community around your brand, products, and company.
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 news about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on your competition, be alerted to disasters, and identify opportunities for engagement. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific topics, businesses, brands, or products.
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 digital reputation specialists, market research, marketing teams, agencies, social engagement and community staff, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of providers have made available many tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict what consumers are saying about your brand or products so you can respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only 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 please see other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider 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.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Use the BuddyPress plugin to run your own social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- 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 posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that encourage users to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication on social media networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Social media marketing tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay ahead of many 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 many apps that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine 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 horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It can help establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven site to automate content syndication on various social media channels.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to observe and discover the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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 channels can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
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 cannot be controlled. 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 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content with 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 – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Digital 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 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things 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 public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative effects with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business 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 person directly, etc.
Businesses are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not effectively managing their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 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” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Managing online reputation is an important aspect of doing business online.
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective user review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management For WordPress
Analyzing Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting 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 videos 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (how many news media outlets now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical content with added 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 may end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part two we explore social media measurement tools for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media Tracking – Part 2
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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