The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your brand, services, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give you instant access to the latest news about your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, spy on the competition, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, identify market opportunities, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, topics, brands, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track social activity on social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including digital reputation management (ORM) agencies, marketing professionals, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various providers have made available many tools that facilitate the tracking of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, see this article: The Small Business Owner’s Guide To 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 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 Services And Products To The Right Audience 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network 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
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium provides 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 features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple 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 from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content on various social media channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social tools and applications to listen to what your market wants, identify trends and 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.
Also, there are many apps and tools that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many apps will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Building and strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 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 horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
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 website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven website can automatically distribute content on social channels.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to observe and learn what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies research social media 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 brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, informative or even funny, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this course we also explore many 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. 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 businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative with an excess of 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 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 can help you. 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.
Companies all around the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security-related agencies. There’s also the reputation of individuals. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Online reputation management should not be ignored if you want your business to grow in the web economy.
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated 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 (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. Posting regular 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 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 content that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part two we explore WordPress social media measurement tools. To keep reading, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking : Tools – Part 2
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