The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve success in today’s connected world, you need to build a social community around your company, brand, and products, based around “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you direct access to the latest information about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on your competitors, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, and identify opportunities for engagement. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor volume and sentiments of social conversations and activity on social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including marketing teams, market researchers, online reputation management (ORM) agencies, sales teams, social engagement and community staff, and social marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify what consumers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about your products or brand allowing you to respond to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using the WP web content management platform please see our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to explore the 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 A Wider Audience 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, YouTube 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.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using 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:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is often referred to 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 open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- 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 Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating content is very easy. There are 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 considerable time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that encourage users to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. 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 various social media networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Use social media tools to listen to what your market wants, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay 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, there are many apps that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand
Strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations to gain 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 poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets circulated 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 website lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automatically distribute content across various social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to observe and and perhaps even be inspired by what the experts are doing.
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 business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral” Online?
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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns 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, 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging 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 info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
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 (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 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 it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses 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 defeating the negative effects with an excess of positive content, 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 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 your name or your business/brand and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies everywhere are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, and security-related agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. Consider the situations below:
- 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, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user reviews. More info: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new 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 release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral on social media, 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 (have you noticed how all news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical content with additional 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 website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore social media monitoring tools for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: Media Monitoring Resources Every WordPress User Should Know About – Part Two
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