The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s connected digital world, you need to build, nurture and engage with a community around your brand, company, and products, based around actively “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of campaigns, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, and spot potential opportunities for engagement. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track conversations and social activity on social media channels like blogs, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, discussion boards, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 PR staff, market researchers, marketing professionals, sales teams, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various technology providers have developed a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Media Monitoring Tools & Applications
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage 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 the WordPress CMS software please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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 business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up a social network 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 has an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium provides a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Member 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.
Syndicate 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 online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to drive 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 plugins that encourage users 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 automatically distribute content across various social networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Social media tracking tools allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and business 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 those social networks.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automatically syndicate your web content across various social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 channels can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget 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 will find so useful, compelling, entertaining or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful 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 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 Big Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about 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 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 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if this goes 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 image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative effects 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 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 a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many businesses all over the world are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. 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 help your case.
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 deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have a system in place for managing your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. Visit this page to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management For WordPress
Predicting Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 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 content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media measurement. To read more, click on this link: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Monitoring Resources – Part Two
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)