The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your company, brand, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you instant access to the latest information about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, assess competitor activity and market share, identify opportunities for engagement, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, social 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 research, online reputation management companies, marketing teams, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately different service providers have created a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify what is being said online about your brand or products so you can react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Media Monitoring Tools & Applications
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and very easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, go here: The Business Owner’s Guide To Understanding WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress can be used to run a social community on WordPress.
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 regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking 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 Messages
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing 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 Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your web content across various social media networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tools to discover what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay one step 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 your social networking sites.
Also, there are many applications that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these apps and tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Brand And Credibility Online
Building your business reputation and brand online, 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 online, 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you automatically syndicate content across various social networks.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands and corporations 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, engaging, informative or even funny, 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 provide a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many 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 Global Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
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 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 will tell 10 more people about it. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies 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 diluting the negative with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business/brand name 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 website or person directly, etc.
Companies everywhere are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of individuals 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 support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
How do you manage your online reputation in the online economy?
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective customer review management. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Client Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you are 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 release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, 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 (how many news media outlets 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 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 content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore more than 25 social media monitoring resources for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Tools – Part Two
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