Tag: Social Media Tracking Tools

The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your company, brand, and products.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give you instant access to the latest news around your services or products.

Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of campaigns, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, and identify market opportunities. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, businesses, topics, or brands.

As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor volume and sentiments of social conversations and 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 groups that include digital reputation specialists, marketing professionals, market researchers, professional sales reps, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately many technology providers have developed affordable tools to facilitate the monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict what is being said online about their products or brands so they can react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.

In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business,etc.

Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?

WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and very easy to use 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 why the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Using WordPress – The Business Owner’s Guide

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, you will be able to tap into 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 Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.

The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• Extended Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• Extensible User Groups
• Friendship Connections
• Online 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 regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium Pro

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

WPSymposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for members who need 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels

With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.

If you want to manage most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your content on various social channels with WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Market Research

Social tracking tools allow you to discover what your target audience wants, identify new opportunities and stay one step ahead of your competition.

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 those social networks.

Also, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many of these apps and tools can be integrated with WordPress.

Build Your Brand And Online Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise

Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.

You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for valuable insights.

Remember, we have been given 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 poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets exposed online.

Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. 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 extremely time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.

(An expertly configured WordPress blog can automate web content syndication on various social media channels.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

“Going Viral” Online Faster

Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands and corporations 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, compelling, informative or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, go here or subscribe using the form below:

Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)

Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

You have probably heard the term 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 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. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the work 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 reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative impact with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do anything, 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business/brand name and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Businesses everywhere are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 enough 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 a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

Are you ignoring your digital reputation?

We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective user review management. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management For WordPress

Monitoring Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 (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 additional 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 website 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 One

In part two we explore social media tracking tools for WordPress. To read more, click on this link: Media Tracking Resources Every Business Owner Should Know About – Part 2

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