The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a social community around your products, brand, and company.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest news about your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and market dominance, identify new market opportunities, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, message 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 a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, marketing professionals, online reputation management (ORM) specialists, social engagement and community staff, 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 media.
Fortunately a number of providers have created many tools to facilitate the tracking of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to track consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Using WordPress To Grow Your Business
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free plugin helps you set up and manage your own social networking community on your website.
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
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online 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.
Share 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 your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your 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 your web content syndication across various social channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social media tools allow you to discover what your market wants, identify new business opportunities and stay one step 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 networking sites.
Also, there are apps that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage 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 and how you respond online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automate content syndication across various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and even be inspired by what experts and leaders in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays researching social media and studying the 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 business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Web Content Be The Next Viral “Hit”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large and well-funded campaigns have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 Two of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also explore 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 Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). 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 if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. People or competitors 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 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 diminishing the negative impact with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you 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 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 person directly, etc.
Businesses around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the online reputation of average individuals. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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 help your case.
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 later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Online reputation management should not be avoided if you want your business to grow.
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective user review management. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Monitoring 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 say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 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 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 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 1
In part 2 we explore dozens of social media tools that can help grow your business online. To read more, click on this link: WordPress And Social Media Monitoring – Part Two
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com