The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your business and services is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s highly connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your company, products, and brand.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you instant access to the latest information about your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spot opportunities for engagement, and spy on the competition. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, topics, products, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, marketing professionals, online reputation management (ORM) specialists, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and social marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various service providers have made available affordable tools that facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to track consumer behavior around their brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – A Guide For Website Owners
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and really easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Using WordPress To Grow A Successful Small Business
Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
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 The Right Audience On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and run an online social network on your site, 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 application.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across social media networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social media marketing tools allows you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify trends and new 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 applications and tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many of these tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 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 poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress site can automatically syndicate content on social networks.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to observe and and perhaps also be inspired by what experts in your niche are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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. Using social media to explore new opportunities and joint ventures 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 have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands and corporations have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, informative or “spot-on”, 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 have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
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 the term 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 others are saying 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 competitors 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 services of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 defeating the negative with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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/brand and a negative comment or review comes up, 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 create happier customers and grow their business because they ignore their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. The ability to monitor the reputation of of average individuals is also very important. Consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support the things you have listed in your job application.
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 later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what visitors are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Client Reviews
Monitoring Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new 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 videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Twitter, 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 (have you noticed how all news media channels 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 One
In part 2 we explore top social media monitoring resources for WordPress users. To keep reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking : Useful Resources – Part 2
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