The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected world, you need to build, nurture and engage with a community around your services, brand, and company and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or products on social media, spy on your competitors, spot potential market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, products, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, social media monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include marketing teams, PR companies, market researchers, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed a range of tools that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to track consumer behavior around their brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section 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 to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This plugin allows you to set up a social network on WordPress.
BuddyPress is known 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 open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- 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 Social Channels
Many social media platforms 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 your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you 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 Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your content across various social media channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social measuring tools and services to discover what your audience wants, identify new 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 your social networking sites.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these applications and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Brand And Reputation
Strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automate content syndication on various social channels with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and and perhaps even be inspired by the success strategies of authorities and thought leaders in your niche.
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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 the next section of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling 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. To learn more, 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)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). 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 others are saying about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material 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 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 weakening the negative impact with an excess of positive material, 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 your name or your business/brand name 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.
Many companies all over the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also important. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you know what customers are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. To learn more, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Client Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps 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, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 and new content ideas (how many news media channels 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 site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media tracking. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Resources For Measuring Social Indicators – Part Two
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)