The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve success in today’s interconnected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your company, brand, and products.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, identify opportunities for engagement, spy on the competition, and avert disasters. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, businesses, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social activity on social media 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 groups that include market research, marketing professionals, online reputation management companies, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed a range of affordable and even free tools to facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to respond to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Media Monitoring Tools
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use CMS 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 using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes 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 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-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
This free plugin allows you to run a social community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- 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 your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
Many social media tools 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 drive most of 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 plugins that allow users to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, 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 content syndication on various social media networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social tools and services allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and opportunities and stay ahead of your competition.
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 many applications that let you survey customers online. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility Online
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automatically distribute content on social networks using an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 media channels can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?
Most 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 are out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 the next section of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content that has 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 Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard about 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 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. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies 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 diluting the negative impact with 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 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 a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security-related agencies. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what visitors 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 user review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 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 and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Twitter, 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 channels now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting content with additional 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 information that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore 29 social media tools for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Resources Every Business Owner Should Know About – 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