The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected digital world, you need to grow and nurture a social community around your brand, company, and products, all based around ”listening” to their needs and feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, identify market opportunities, avert impending crises, assess competitor activity and mind share, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, topics, products, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, social 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 people including market researchers, marketing teams, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, social engagement and community staff, sales teams, and social marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different service providers have developed affordable tools that facilitate the active tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to identify what consumers are saying about your products or brand so you can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and really easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your business grow and succeed online, go here: Everything You Need To Know About Growing Your Business Online Using WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be 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 WordPress plugin)
This free plugin lets you run your own social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, 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 plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- 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 posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, 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 time and money.
If you want to manage 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 encourage your site visitors to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out 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 networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Use social media measuring tools and services to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and business 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 your social pages.
Also, there are apps that let you run surveys online. Many applications will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation
Building your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on 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. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community finds out about it.
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 website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automate web content syndication on social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to observe and even be inspired by what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Web Content Be The Next Viral Sensation?
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 are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits 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 will find so useful, compelling, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 meaningful and engaging content. 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 information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about 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 it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, 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 reducing the negative with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses everywhere are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively managing their online reputations.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of average individuals is also important. For example, consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective strategy to manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you 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 Managing Customer Feedback
Monitoring Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you are 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 information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 (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 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 information that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement resources. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Tools For Monitoring Social Indicators – Part 2
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org