The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a web page with static information. To achieve success in today’s interconnected global and digital world, you need to build a community around your brand, services, and company, based around actively “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, be alerted to impending crises, identify opportunities for engagement, and assess competitor activity and market share. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to track social media channels like blogging, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, discussion boards, video sites, and user-generated content 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 online reputation management (ORM) companies, market researchers, marketing professionals, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and agencies. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your products or brand so you can react to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not just 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 the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, go here: Understanding WordPress – The Small Business Owner’s Guide
Using some of the tools listed here 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 for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you run a social networking community on your WordPress site.
BuddyPress is known as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- 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 Many 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 drive most of your social marketing strategy 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 allow users to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication on social media channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social tools to discover what your market wants, identify 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 your social accounts.
Also, many tools are available that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. 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 the online community finds out about it.
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, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress site can automatically distribute your content on various social media networks.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to discover and and maybe also be inspired by what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Using social media to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most 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 are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, engaging, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this 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 Large Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard about 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 is being said about them online – especially if what is being said 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. 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 services of PR companies, 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 diminishing the negative with 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 yourself 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 person directly, etc.
Many businesses around the world are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations 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 enough good, positive things published online either to support the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Reviews 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 apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 provides 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. 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 may end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore WordPress tools and social media tracking. To read the rest of this article, click here: Media Monitoring Tools For Business Owners – Part Two
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