The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve success in today’s connected digital economy, you need to grow and nurture an engaged social community around your company, brand, and products, based around actively “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give you instant access to the latest news about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, be alerted to impending crises, spy on your competitors, and spot opportunities for engagement. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, topics, brands, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track 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 PR staff, market researchers, marketing teams, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of service providers have made available a range of tools to facilitate the monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, allowing you to identify what is being said online about your brand or products allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes built-in social features, like interactive 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 content for social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- 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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
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 Mail
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that allow users to easily share your web 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 web content syndication across various social media networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social media monitoring tools and applications allow you to discover what your market wants, identify 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 your social networking sites.
Additionally, there are apps that let you survey customers online. Many apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Credibility And Brand
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, 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 or customer complaint very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
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, but it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven website to automatically syndicate your content across social media networks.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and and perhaps also reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Go Viral” Online Faster
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 are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands and corporations have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 the next section of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content with 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 Big Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about online reputation management (ORM). 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative effects with an excess of 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 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/brand and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Businesses everywhere are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also important. For example, consider the scenarios 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 enough good, positive things published online either to help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
How do you manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective customer review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Management Of Client Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated 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 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. Posting regular 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 online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore WordPress resources for social media tracking. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Tools For Social Media Monitoring – Part Two
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