The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your services, company, and brand.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, services, or company on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on your competitors, avert crises, and identify new market opportunities. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor social media 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 marketing professionals, online reputation specialists, market research, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the active tracking of a broad range of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Media Management Tools & Applications
WordPress is not just 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, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, see this article: Understanding WordPress – The Small Business Owner’s Guide
Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 business 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 An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website 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:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friendship 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels
Many social media tools 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 your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your web content on various social media networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Use social media measuring tools to discover what your market wants, 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, many apps and tools are available that let you run surveys online. Many tools will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Brand And Credibility Online
Building your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, 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 meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 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 very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automate web content syndication across social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you discover and even be inspired by what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands have failed dismally.
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, compelling, informative or even funny, 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content. In this course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Global Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard about online reputation management. If you haven’t, you will be hearing 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 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or reputation 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 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 a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security agencies. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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” social media alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what people are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
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 announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress resources and media monitoring. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media Tracking – Part Two
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie