The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your services, brand, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give you instant access to the latest news around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or services on social media, spy on your competitors, be alerted to disasters, measure the impact of campaigns, and spot market opportunities. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, businesses, topics, or brands.
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 market research, marketing professionals, PR staff, social marketing agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately different service providers have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify what is being said online about your brand or products allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage CMS 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, go here: Everything You Need To Know About Growing Your Small Business With WordPress
Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, 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 for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Networks 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, 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 article titles and descriptions for social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free plugin lets you set up a social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
BuddyPress is known 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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- 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 posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that encourage users to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on social media networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Social tools and applications allow you to listen to what your market wants, identify trends and new 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 your social accounts.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your business 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 meaningful and authentic. 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. 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 circulated online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automate your web content syndication on social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and learn what experts and leaders in your niche are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Many 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 you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever advertising 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 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content that has 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 – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard about 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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being said 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 other people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services 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 reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative impact with 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 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 address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-related departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute is feeling 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, 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 the situation in a timely manner.
Online reputation management is important in the online economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on Twitter, yesterday’s must-have new 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 (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 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 could 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 information that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore social media monitoring resources for WordPress users. To continue reading, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Tools For Measuring Social Metrics – 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)