The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your company, brand, and products.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, spot potential market opportunities, spy on the competition, be alerted to impending crises, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor social media channels like blogging, internet forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Medium, etc., discussion boards, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including market researchers, marketing professionals, online reputation specialists, sales teams, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and really easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your business succeed online, see this article: WordPress For Small Business – An Online Guide To Growing A Small Business With WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Set up your own social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
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 plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social 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 manage your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on social channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Using social tools allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay one step 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 conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, 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 poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automate your content syndication across various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of experts, authorities, and thought leaders 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, 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 quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large and well-funded campaigns 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, 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 provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this course we also discuss ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital 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 others are saying 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 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or good standing 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 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 companies are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not effectively managing their online reputations.
Monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute is feeling 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, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Managing your digital reputation is becoming more important in the online economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. More info: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, 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 becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 (how many news media broadcasters now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting topical 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore dozens of media resources that can help grow your business online. To keep reading, click on this link: WordPress Resources For Media Tracking – Part Two
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