The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your brand, services, and company.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest information about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, services, or brand on social media, identify new opportunities for engagement, assess competitor activity and mind share, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by online users. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to track online conversations and social activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, discussion groups, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 market researchers, marketing teams, digital reputation management (ORM) agencies, sales teams, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many providers have made available affordable tools to facilitate the monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, enabling you to track what is being said online about your brand or products allowing you to respond to conversations and interact with online users in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social business 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 An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social 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 cards, 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 and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up your own social networking community on your website.
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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating content is very easy. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to run 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 allow users to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content on social media with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social marketing tools and services allow you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify trends and new business 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 accounts.
Also, there are applications that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many apps will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Online Reputation
Building and strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as 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, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven site to automate your web content syndication across various social networks.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media can help you discover and and maybe even reverse engineer what the experts 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. Connecting with others through social channels can increase 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 outcome 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 succeeded virally while big-budget and well-funded campaigns 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, engaging, informative 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free 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 – Not Just For Global Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
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 many individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative effects 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 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 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 are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the situations 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 enough good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you know what people are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate 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 publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on Twitter, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (have you noticed how all 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 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 an authoritative 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress tools for social media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Tools For Social Media Measurement – Part Two
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