The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your brand, company, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news about your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competition, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, measure the impact of campaigns, and spot market opportunities. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor social activity on social media channels like blogs, forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, etc., message boards, video sites, and user-generated content 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 market researchers, online reputation management (ORM) agencies, marketing professionals, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to respond to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
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 marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right 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, 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 networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking 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
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share 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 manage most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that encourage users to share your content online 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 syndicate content across social channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Use social media tools and applications to listen to what your market wants, identify trends and new 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.
Additionally, many apps are available that let you survey customers online. Many tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 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 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 customer situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed 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 take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automate your content syndication across various social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to reverse engineer what the experts are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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. Connecting with others through social channels can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
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 completely outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.
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, engaging, 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 provide a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also discuss ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
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 if what is being posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying 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 businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative 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 your name or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations.
Monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. Consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 enough 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” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective customer review management. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management For WordPress
Tracking Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, 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 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 and new content ideas (have you noticed how all news media channels 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 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 content that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media measurement. To continue reading, click here: WordPress Social Media Monitoring : Useful Tools – Part 2
***
"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya