The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve success in today’s connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your products, brand, and company.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give you immediate access to the latest information around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your products, brand, or company on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, identify market opportunities, and assess competitor activity and market dominance. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, businesses, topics, 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 research, marketing teams, social engagement and community personnel, professional sales reps, and social marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many service providers have created tools that facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress web content management software please click on links to visit our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media 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 various social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be 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)
Set up your own social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro 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
- 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 posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating your 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 a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 automate content syndication on social channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social media tools and applications allows you to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new opportunities and stay one step 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 your social accounts.
Also, there are many applications and tools that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications and tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Building your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. 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 comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community finds out about it.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website can help establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automatically distribute content across various social networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and and perhaps also be inspired by what experts in your niche 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 increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “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 campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.
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 an email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this 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 – Not Just For Big Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing it more and more as time goes on, because it is becoming increasingly more important for high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 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 brand and if left 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 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 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 name 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.
Companies all around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of average individuals. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things 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 negative reviews about your services through effective customer review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news sites 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 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part 2 we explore best social media monitoring resources for WordPress users. To read more, click here: Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress Users – Part Two
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