The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s highly connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your company, brand, and products.
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 what people are saying about your products, company, or brand on social media, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on your competitors, and identify opportunities for engagement. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think 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 a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, online reputation management companies, marketing teams, sales teams, social engagement and community staff, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed many affordable tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your products or brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management 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 why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your business grow online, see this article: Using WordPress – A Small Business Owner’s Guide
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 business 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 An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions 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 site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Online 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 an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium provides 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 social features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are 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 considerable time and money.
If you want to drive your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many plugins that allow your site visitors to share your 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 automate your content syndication across various social media channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social media monitoring tools and services allow you to listen to what your market wants, identify trends and 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 those social networks.
Additionally, there are tools that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building and strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 and how you respond online 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 as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate your content across social channels using an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations can help you reverse engineer what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Go Viral” Faster
Most 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 completely outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns 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, informative 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 have created an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many ways to create content that has 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 – Not Just For Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
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 of 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 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. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative effects with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, however, you first have to find out about it. The sooner you can spot 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 yourself or your business and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Online reputation management is becoming more important in the digital economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, 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, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 (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 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 other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part two we explore great social media resources for business owners. To read the rest of this article, click here: WordPress Resources For Media Measurement – Part 2
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