The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your company, brand, and services.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, measure the impact of campaigns, spot market opportunities, and spy on your competition. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, businesses, brands, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor social media channels like blogging, forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms, 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, typically carried out by a cross-section of people including marketing teams, PR companies, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, sales teams, and agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict what consumers are saying about your products or brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Tracking Tools & Applications
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services 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 article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship 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.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your content across various social media channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Social tools and applications allow you to listen to what your audience wants, identify new opportunities and stay 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 networking sites.
Additionally, there are applications and tools that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many applications can be integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Brand And Online Reputation
Strengthening your reputation and brand, 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 meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 to comments and discussions online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog to automate your web content syndication across various social media networks.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what the experts are doing right.
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 to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral Sensation?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands 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, 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing 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 posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to 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 brand’s image, 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 an excess of 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 yourself or your business/brand name and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies everywhere are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. Being able to monitor the reputation of of average individuals is also important. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 a lot of 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” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How are you managing your online reputation in the web economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Tracking Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news media channels now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 could 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 other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore media resources that can help grow your business online. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking Tools – Part Two
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