The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your company, brand, and products.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, avert disasters, spot new opportunities for engagement, spy on the competition, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social media monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include marketing professionals, PR staff, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various providers have developed tools that facilitate the monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what is being said online about their products or brands allowing them to react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and very 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the full power social media marketing opportunities.
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 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) 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 network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This plugin can be used to run a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online 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
Many social media platforms 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 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 online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on social channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social monitoring tools and services to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay ahead of your competition.
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 applications and tools that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand Online
Strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear 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 gets hold of the news.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress blog to automatically distribute content on social channels.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and discover the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays researching social media and studying the 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 and joint ventures can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, compelling, entertaining 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking 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 is being said about them online – especially if what is being said 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 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses 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 defeating the negative effects with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business and spot a negative comment or review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security departments. There’s also the reputation of average individuals. 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 support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. More information: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Tracking Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 media broadcasters 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 a “go to” 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore media resources that can help grow your business online. To continue reading this article, click here: Best Social Media Tracking Tools For WordPress Users – 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