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 achieve success in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to grow and nurture an engaged social community around your brand, services, and company and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.
Social 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 information about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on the competition, spot potential market opportunities, and help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, brands, businesses, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor social conversations and social activity on social media 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, online reputation managers, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track what is being said online about their brands or products so they can react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that are worth knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Media Management Tools & Applications
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 using WordPress please see our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, 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 makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Social Media 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website 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
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to drive your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your content on various social networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social tools and applications to discover what your target audience wants, identify trends and new 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.
Additionally, many applications are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Reputation And Brand
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you automatically syndicate your content on social networks.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
Many 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 are out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands have failed to take off.
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, engaging, 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many 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 activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said 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 tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that 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 weakening the negative with 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 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business/brand 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 person directly, etc.
Many companies all over the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security-related agencies. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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, you can still create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective digital reputation management strategy in place?
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Reviews 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 products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on social media, 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 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 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 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 other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social tracking resources. To read the rest of this article, click here: Essential Social Media Tracking Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part Two
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group