The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s highly connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your company, services, and brand.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest information about your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your services, brand, or company on social media, assess competitor activity, spot potential opportunities for engagement, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social media 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, market researchers, PR companies, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and social marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different providers have made available tools to facilitate the tracking of a wide range of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict what consumers are saying about their products or brands so they can respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – A Guide For Business Owners
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very 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 using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the full power of marketing your business on social media.
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 Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Media 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress helps you run your own social network on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, 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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add 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 makes available many great plugins that encourage users to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication on various social channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social media tools and applications to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay 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 those social networks.
Also, there are apps that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, 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 authentic and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. 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 be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you automate content syndication across social media.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and discover what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies research social media 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.
Could Your Web Content Be The Next Online Viral Sensation?
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands have failed.
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 Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging 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 details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
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 many 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 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations 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 weakening the negative with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 your name or your business/brand 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.
Companies around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, 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 enough good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Are you managing your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective customer review management. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 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. Posting regular topical 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 content that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful social tracking resources. To read more, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking : Useful Resources – Part Two
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)