The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page about your company is not enough. To achieve success in today’s connected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged social community around your services, brand, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on your competition, identify potential market opportunities, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, brands, businesses, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include digital reputation management companies, market research, marketing teams, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed many affordable tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your brand 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 tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Monitoring Tools
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and extremely easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, 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 makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Social Media 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 content for various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of 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 makes available a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 automatically distribute content on social media channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Social measuring tools and applications allow you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and opportunities and stay one step 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 apps are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a solid 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 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 and how you respond online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress website can automate your content syndication on social media channels.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and discover the success strategies of experts and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users 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 the next section 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 useful and compelling content. In this free course we also discuss 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 Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term 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 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies 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 effects 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 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 companies all over the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they are still ignoring their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective digital reputation management strategy?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Management Of Customer Reviews
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate 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 presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 an authoritative 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 Part 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement resources. To keep reading this article, click here: WordPress Tools: Social Media Monitoring – Part Two
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group