The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your brand, company, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, spot market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on the competition. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific topics, products, brands, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, social signal 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 teams, market researchers, PR agencies, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed a range of tools that facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their brands or products allowing them to respond to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Tracking Tools
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use CMS 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 why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your business grow online, go here: Learning WordPress – A Small Business Owner’s Guide
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of 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 An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely 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)
Run your own online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
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 regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing 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 offers many great plugins that encourage users to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your web content on social media networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Using social tracking tools and services allows you to discover what your target audience wants, identify new trends and 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 those social networks.
Also, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand Online
Strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 to users online 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 poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog to automate content syndication on various social media networks.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to observe and learn what thought leaders and influencers in your niche 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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands 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, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this 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 – 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 (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard of online reputation management. 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 it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to 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, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative impact with positive material, 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they ignore their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the online reputation of average individuals. Consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Are you managing your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. Visit this page for more information: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting 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 publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, yesterday’s next big 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. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 a “go to” destination or resource for your niche or industry. People may 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 content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore top media tools that can help grow your business online. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: Essential Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress Users – Part Two
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