The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged social community around your products, brand, and company.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give you instant access to the latest information around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, spy on your competitors, identify market opportunities, be alerted to impending crises, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, brands, products, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track volume and sentiments of social conversations and social activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms, discussion groups, 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 various people including marketing teams, digital reputation specialists, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various providers have made available a range of affordable and even free tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, enabling companies to track what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about their brands or products allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and extremely easy to use CMS 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.
For an overview of why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: The Complete Guide To Growing A Successful Small Business Using WordPress
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 to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Your Social 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, 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 article titles and descriptions 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 transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free WordPress plugin can be used to run your own social network on WordPress.
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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium 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 Messaging
- 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 your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels
Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online 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 from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that encourage users to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 web content syndication across social media with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social tools allows you to discover what your audience wants, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay 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.
Additionally, many apps are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand Online
Strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations for 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute content across social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer what experts in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Go Viral” Online Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “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 marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands have failed dismally.
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 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also explore ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, 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 can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 high profile and even general 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage 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, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative impact with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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 bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business 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-conscious 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 a bitter 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 the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what customers are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral 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 (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 your 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Tools – Part 2
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum