The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your business or services is not enough. To succeed in today’s interconnected global and digital economy, you need to build a community around your products, company, and brand, based around “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest news about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, spot new opportunities for engagement, spy on your competitors, and measure the impact of campaigns. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific brands, topics, products, or businesses.
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 various groups that include marketing teams, market research, digital reputation managers, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of service providers have developed affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands or products allowing them to respond to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content management 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 online business goals, go here: WordPress For Business Owners – A Complete Guide To Growing Your Business With WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in 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 to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes 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, 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 social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
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
- 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium 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
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
Many social media platforms 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 most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many plugins that allow your site visitors to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your web content across social media using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social measuring tools and applications allows you to listen to what your market wants, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step 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 those social networks.
Also, many tools are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Brand And Credibility
Strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It can help establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress site to automatically syndicate content on social media channels.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of authorities and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays researching social media and studying the 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 to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 the next section of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also discuss many ways to create content with 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of online reputation management. 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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being posted 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 competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left 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 diminishing the negative impact with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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 and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies all over the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of individuals. For example, consider these scenarios:
- 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 enough good, positive things published online either to help your case.
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 about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you know what users are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (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. Posting regular 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 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 content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore 30 social media tracking resources for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Tools For Monitoring Social Activities – Part Two
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