The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your brand, company, and products.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, assess competitor activity, spot opportunities for engagement, be alerted to disasters, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, brands, businesses, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor social media channels like blogs, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms, discussion boards, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including marketing teams, market researchers, online reputation management companies, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and agencies. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the active tracking of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands or products so they can 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 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 really easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
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-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, 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 plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- Member Directory
- Groups
- 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 Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to drive 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 has a number of plugins that encourage users to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, 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 on social media networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Social tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and 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 your social network pages.
Additionally, many apps and tools are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, 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 and how you respond to users online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up suffering heavy losses 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 an authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute content on social channels using an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and even be inspired by what the experts are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in the next section of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss 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 Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 said 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 competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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 address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 a lot of 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, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective system in place for managing your online reputation in the web economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate 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 get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 (have you noticed how all news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 site or brand 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 the next section we explore media monitoring tools for business owners. To keep reading this article, click on this link: WordPress Tools: Social Media Tracking – Part Two
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