The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to put up a web page with static information. To succeed in today’s interconnected global and digital economy, you need to build and engage with a social community around your company, brand, and services and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest information about your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and mind share, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, and identify potential market opportunities. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, businesses, brands, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to track online conversations and activity on social media channels like blogs, internet forums, social networking sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Medium, etc., discussion boards, video sites, and user-generated content 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 research, marketing professionals, digital reputation management companies, professional sales reps, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology providers have developed many affordable tools that facilitate the tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of 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 is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress allows you to set up a social community on your website.
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 an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content on social channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Social tracking tools and services allow you to listen to what your market wants, identify new trends and opportunities and stay one step ahead of 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, many applications are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Brand And Online Reputation
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, 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 and how you respond to users 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 suffering heavy losses when the online community finds out about it.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress site lets you automatically distribute content on various social networks.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to observe and and maybe even reverse engineer what the experts are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign 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 know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, compelling, 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content. In this free course we also discuss 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 – 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
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard about 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 is being said 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. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative effects with positive material, 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 come in. If you Google your name 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 all around the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of individuals. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody battle 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, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
How do you manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy User Reviews Management
Monitoring Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 media outlets now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media monitoring. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Tracking Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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