The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your services, company, and brand.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news around your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, identify potential market opportunities, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social activity, trends, and volume and sentiments of social conversations on social media channels like blogging, forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, message boards, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 PR companies, market research, marketing professionals, professional sales reps, social engagement and community personnel, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed a range of tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track what consumers are saying about your products or brand allowing you to respond to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage 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 WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, go here: The Business Owner’s Guide To Using WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social 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.
Pitch Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up 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 Messaging
- User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social 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 lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content online 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 automatically syndicate content across various social media networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social tools and applications allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and business 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 networking sites.
Also, there are tools that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications and tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 and how you respond online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog can help establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site can automate content syndication on various social media networks.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you observe and discover what experts 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 media channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content Be The Next Online Viral Sensation?
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands have failed to take off.
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, 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content that has 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
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
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 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses 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 work 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 weakening the negative effects 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Businesses are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you have a strategy to manage your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective user review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business 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 research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (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 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 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 1
In the next section we explore social media tools every business owner should become familiar with. To read more, click here: Social Media Tracking Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum