The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a social community around your brand, services, and company.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct 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 brand, company, or services on social media, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on your competitors, and identify opportunities for engagement. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor social media channels like blogs, forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., message boards, video/photo sharing websites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include marketing professionals, PR agencies, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict what is being said online about their products or brands so they can react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and very easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 please click on links to visit our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Social Media 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, 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 various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you set up and manage your own social community on your site.
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 Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with 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
- Member 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many 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 most of 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 web content 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 web content syndication on social media channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Social tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and opportunities and stay ahead of 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.
Additionally, there are many apps that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many apps can be integrated with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Reputation And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute content across social networks with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations can help you observe and learn the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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 business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.
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 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss many ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)
In general, social media monitoring 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if this goes 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 defeating the negative effects with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 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 address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 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” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you know what visitors are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage user feedback. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For User Reviews Management
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of which 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 announced online, 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 goes viral 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (have you noticed how all 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 content with your 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 business 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 One
In the next section we explore top social media tracking tools for WordPress. To read more, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Resources – Part 2
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