The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page about your company is not enough. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to build a community around your company, products, and brand, based around actively ”listening” to what they have to say.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, assess competitor activity, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users, identify new market opportunities, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, businesses, topics, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, social monitoring 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 people including market research, marketing teams, online reputation management companies, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed tools that facilitate the monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your small business grow and succeed online, see this article: WordPress For Small Business – The Complete Guide To Growing Your Business Using A WordPress Blog
Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article and a WordPress site, 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 is an ideal platform to market 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images 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 marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
This plugin allows you to set up a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, 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.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that encourage users to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication on various social media channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social media tools and services allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and business 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 applications that let you run surveys online. Many applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 other user’s comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress website helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate content on various social networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and learn what the experts are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, informative 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 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 meaningful and compelling content. In this free course we also explore 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 Big Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
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 of online reputation management. 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 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now 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 defeating 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business 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.
Many companies are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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” 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.
Managing digital reputation should not be ignored if you want your business to grow.
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (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 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 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 Part 1
In part 2 we explore essential social media tracking resources for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress – Part Two
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