The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s connected digital economy, you need to build, nurture and engage with a social community around your brand, company, and services, based around actively ”listening” to their feedback.
Social media 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 around your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your products, company, or brand on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of campaigns, be alerted to crises, and spy on your competitors. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.
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 a cross-section of people including marketing professionals, PR staff, market researchers, agencies, social engagement and community staff, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately many service providers have made available tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content management 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 WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, 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 for marketing 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, 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 networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing 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 website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend 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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple 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 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 easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication across various social networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Using social tools and services allows you to listen to what consumers want, 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.
Also, there are apps that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand
Strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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, 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 being the subject of much scorn and derision when 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 blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute content on various social networks using an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to observe and and maybe also reverse engineer what experts and thought leaders in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands and corporations have failed.
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, compelling, informative or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this free 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Digital 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 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative with positive content, 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies all around the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not effectively managing their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring conversations and new posts on social media extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. Consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 the things you have listed in 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 about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you know what visitors are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business through effective user review management. For more details, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new 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 information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news media broadcasters now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting topical 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 could 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 One
In part 2 we explore WordPress tools and media tracking. To continue reading this article, click here: 30 Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum