The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your products, company, and brand.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give you direct access to the latest news around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, spot opportunities for engagement, spy on your competitors, be alerted to crises, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including market research, PR companies, marketing professionals, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different providers have made available tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify what consumers are saying about your brand so you can react to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Media Monitoring Tools
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and very 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.
To learn more about using the WP CMS software please see our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in 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 for marketing 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, 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 networks.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress allows you to set up and manage your own social networking community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, 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 regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- 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 Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence 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 strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that allow users to share your content 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 content syndication across various social media channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social media tools allows you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify trends and new 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 those social networks.
Also, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps will integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Brand And Credibility
Strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority 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. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automate web content syndication across social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of experts and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 to explore new opportunities can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
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 out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large and well-funded campaigns 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 “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also explore ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital 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 will tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative with an excess of positive content, 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 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 can help you. 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 are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security-related departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of average individuals. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still 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.
How well do you manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. See this page to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 an authoritative destination or resource for your niche or industry. People may 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 others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media measurement. To read more, click on this link: WordPress And Social Media Monitoring – Part Two
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum