The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s interconnected digital world, you need to grow and nurture an engaged community around your services, brand, and company, based around “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest information around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, spot new market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, assess competitor activity and market share, and help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, topics, brands, or products.
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, often carried out by a cross-section of groups that include digital reputation management (ORM) companies, market research, marketing professionals, social engagement and community personnel, professional sales reps, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed a range of affordable and even free tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what is being said online about their products or brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Monitoring Tools
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and really easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, see this article: The Complete Guide To Growing Your Small Business Using WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to tap into the new social business 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.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience 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, 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 various social networks.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to run most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that allow users to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content across social channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Using social marketing tools and applications allows you to listen to 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 pages.
Also, there are applications that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Brand And Online Reputation
Building and strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 other user’s comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you automate content syndication on various social channels.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to monitor social media allows you to reverse engineer what the experts are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 media can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral” Online?
Most 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 advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users 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 Part 2 of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content. 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 information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 negative comments, reviews, etc.. 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 businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative with an excess of positive material, 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business 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 person directly, etc.
Businesses everywhere are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of average individuals is also important. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- 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 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, 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 can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective user review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Management Of Customer Feedback
Predicting 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 promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets 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 Twitter, 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 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. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 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 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 WordPress and social media and useful tools for measuring social performance. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
***
"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