The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your business and products is not enough. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your company, services, and brand.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, services, or company on social media, avert disasters, assess competitor activity and market dominance, measure the impact of campaigns, and identify potential opportunities for engagement. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, products, topics, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to track social media 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, PR agencies, market research, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and social marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of service providers have created affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their brands so they can react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just 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, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your business grow and succeed online, see this article: The Complete Guide To Growing Your Business Using WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, 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 provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online 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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium offers 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
- 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many 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 simultaneously and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable 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 has many plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across various social networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Social tools allow you to discover what your market 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 pages.
Also, there are applications that let you run surveys online. Many apps and tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.
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 is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automate content syndication across social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to discover and even be inspired by the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 channels can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, 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 a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands have failed dismally.
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 the next section of this article can 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 compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 others are saying 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 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if left 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 businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative with an excess of positive content, 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 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 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 address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Businesses around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring conversations and posts on social media extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. There’s also the online reputation of individuals. Consider the situations below:
- 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 support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” 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 know what visitors are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective user review management. To learn more, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 (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 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part two we explore dozens of media tracking resources every business owner should become familiar with. To continue reading this article, click here: Media Tracking Tools For Business Owners – Part Two
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