The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve success in today’s highly connected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your brand, services, and company.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, assess competitor activity and market dominance, avert crises, and spot new market opportunities. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, topics, products, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, social signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include marketing professionals, PR companies, market research, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of service providers have developed many tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what is being said online about their products or brands allowing them to respond to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use content publishing 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.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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, YouTube 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.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many 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 makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication on social media networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Social marketing tools and applications allow you to discover what your target audience wants, 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 your social pages.
Also, there are apps that let you run surveys online. Many of these apps and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility Online
Strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 and how you respond online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog to automate your web content syndication across social media channels.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and even reverse engineer the success strategies of experts and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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. Connecting with others through 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 have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.
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, compelling, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally 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 many 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 will tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff 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 companies, reputation management is now an issue that 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 reducing the negative impact with an excess of positive content, 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 yourself or your business 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 website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of individuals. Consider these scenarios:
- 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 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, you can still create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business through effective customer review management. To learn more, go here: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Predicting Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, 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 and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 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 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 site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore social media monitoring resources for WordPress users. To continue reading, click here: 25+ Media Resources For WordPress Users – Part 2
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now