The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your company or services is not enough. To succeed in today’s highly connected world, you need to build and nurture a community around your services, company, and brand, all based around “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you direct access to the latest information around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, products, or brand on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, identify opportunities for engagement, spy on the competition, and help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, brands, businesses, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, social signal 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 research, digital reputation managers, marketing professionals, professional sales reps, social engagement and community staff, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately a number of providers have developed many affordable tools that facilitate the active tracking of a wide range of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can react to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to use 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 using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of 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.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience 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 images 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 great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you set up a social networking community on your website.
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 application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking 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 Messages
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content online 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 automate content syndication across various social networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social media tools and services to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and opportunities and stay 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 tools are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps will integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Brand And Credibility Online
Strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community finds out about it.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automate web content syndication on various social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and learn the success strategies of experts, authorities, and thought leaders 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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral” Online?
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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands and corporations 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, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this course we also explore 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 can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard the term 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 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 tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies 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 PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative effects with an excess of positive material, 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 can help you. If you Google yourself 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 website or person directly, etc.
Companies are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- 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 enough good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How do you manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage user reviews. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 (how many news media outlets now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part two we explore 25+ media tracking resources every WordPress user should become familiar with. To read the rest of this article, click here: Social Media Tracking Tools For Business Owners – Part 2
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)