The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your company, brand, and products.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give you instant access to the latest news about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, spot new opportunities for engagement, and avert disasters. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
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 a cross-section of people including market researchers, marketing teams, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify what consumers are saying about their brands so they can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and really easy to use content management 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.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Everything You Need To Know About Growing A Successful Business Online With A WordPress Blog
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social business 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.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) 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 WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- 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
With most social media platforms, syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
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 encourage users to share your web 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 content syndication on various social media channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social tools to discover what your target audience wants, identify new trends and 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 those social networks.
Additionally, there are apps that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Brand And Online Reputation
Strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations to gain 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 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 customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community finds out about it.
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-driven blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automatically distribute content across various social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you observe and and maybe also reverse engineer what experts and thought leaders in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.
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 “spot-on”, 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 a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also explore 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 – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
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 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 will tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative effects with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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 your name or your business and spot a negative comment or review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. There’s also the online reputation of average individuals. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you have an online reputation management strategy in place?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage customer reviews. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Customer Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which 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 presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news media outlets 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 added 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 an authoritative 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 Section 1
In part two we explore more than 27 social media measurement resources for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: Top Social Media Measurement Resources For Business Owners – Part Two
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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